Software router state of the art

Tue Jul 29 01:07:42 UTC 2008

On Mon, 28 Jul 2008, Rev. Jeffrey Paul wrote:

> As much as I hate to contribute to the problem, I'd like to point out
> that the barrage of useless, off-topic, empty traffic on this list in
> the last week is, in my estimation, quite a bit above the "usual" ruckus
> of NANOG.
>
> While I'm not one to thunk down the rulebook, can you all collectively
> knock it off?

I gotta disagree with you, especially with regard to this thread. Much of 
the conversations on this topic have ancillary benefits, specifically for 
folks who need to populate networks with things like 10g forensic sensors 
or similiar. I don't see commodity hardware router discussions being any 
different from a foundry vs juniper vs crisco discussion, be it typical 
fanboy nonsense or otherwise. As far as active threads on nanog go, the 
signal to noise ratio on this one has already far exceeded more 
'operational' ones. Even anecdotal experiences noted thus far have been 
pretty insightful, and useful.

I even totally resisted the urge of bombing the thread by extolling the 
virtues of the Killer NIC as a solution to all the throughput problems 
people have, because I felt it would really derail what has thus far been 
a fairly educational thread.

That said though, the more I thought about it (the killer nic joke), the 
more I looked at it. What's the state of NPU offloading amongst software 
routers? Is the notion even viable? I've seen a couple remarks about 
various brands of network cards having various buffer and interrupt driven 
issues as serious limiters to pps throughput, which is what prompted me to 
think of it in the first place.

- billn