Software router state of the art

Wed Jul 23 16:17:40 UTC 2008

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008, Charles Wyble wrote:

> This might be of interest:
> 
> http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/tmp/vrouter-perf.pdf

Various FreeBSD related guys are working on parallelising the forwarding
layer enough to use the multiple tx/rx queues in some chipsets such as the
Intel gig/10ge stuff.

1 mil pps has been broken that way, but it uses lots of cores to get there.
(8, I think?)

Linux apparently is/has headed down this path.

If someone were to spend some time dissecting the rest of the code to
also optimise the single-core throughput then you may see some interesting
software routers using commodity hardware (for values of "commodity"
roughly equal to "PC servers", rather than "magic lotsacore core MIPS with
some extra glue for jacking packets around."

Sure its not a CRS-1, but reliably doing a mil pps with a smattering of
low-touch features would be rather useful, no?

(Then, add say, l2tp/ppp into that mix, just as a crazy on-topic example..)

Adrian