Software router state of the art

Tue Aug 5 12:29:14 UTC 2008

* Stuart Henderson <stu at spacehopper.org> [2008-08-01 19:06]:
> On 2008-07-28, Joe Greco <jgreco at ns.sol.net> wrote:
> >> I have yet to look into *BSD based solutions, but hear very good things 
> >> about firewall performance. I don't know about BGP/OSPF/MPLS etc support 
> >> on FreeBSD but am going to wager a guess its on par with Linux if not 
> >> better.
> >
> > The underlying OS is responsible for packet forwarding, but none of them
> > do any significant routing protocols natively.
> 
> OpenBSD has OpenOSPFD/OpenBGPD in the base OS rather than as a port/
> package, so it's fully coupled with any kernel changes (and supports
> some things missing from the FreeBSD port).

can't be stressed enough; the concept of
OpenBGPD/OSPFD/RIPD/DVRMPD/OSPF6D (did I forget one again?) is not
too be just another daemon implementing the protocol at hand, they
come with massive changes to the OpenBSD kernel to offer an
alternative to other solutions, including "hardware" routers.

Now it is quite clear that you don't want to run 5 loaded 10GE ports
on any Hardware OpenBSD currently supports (it's not just PCs), but
there are enough installations with smaller bandwidth requirements
where it is a very viable alternative.

-- 
Henning Brauer, hb at bsws.de, henning at openbsd.org
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