PBR needing to hit the cpu?

Sun Sep 18 17:28:22 UTC 2005

On Sat, 17 Sep 2005, David Hubbard wrote:

> Just curious, do most vendors' hardware need to hit the cpu when doing
> policy-based routing?

As far as I know, the hardware that you are likely using from the major
company in the bay area is going to put all PBR traffic through the CPU.

Other vendors do it in different ways, but any vendor that only does the
standard destination address lookup in hardware will have to do exception
processing in the CPU.  Most routers fall into this category.  The
differences will be how efficiently the CPU handles the processing, and
that will determine the load.

Unfortunately, any more specific information of what vendors do would be a
violation of the NDAs.

 -Sean