Software router state of the art

Wed Jul 23 16:32:55 UTC 2008

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008, Chris Marlatt wrote:

> http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/net/2008-06/msg00364.html 
> has all the details. It's rather long thread but 1mpps was achieved on a 
> single cpu IIRC (the server had multiple cpus but only one being used 
> for forwarding). Firewall rules slowed it down quite a bit but theres 
> also some work out there being done to minimize this.

Yah, all of that is happening. Some people keep asking why FreeBSD-4
forwarding was always much faster than same-hardware forwarding under
current FreeBSD but at least thats finally being worked on.

Of course, with my FreeBSD advocacy hat on, if you -want- to see
something like FreeBSD handle 1mil+ pps forwarding then you should
really drop the FreeBSD Foundation a line and introduce yourself.
There are developers working on this (note: not me! :) who would
benefit from equipment and funding.

Anyway. Some PC class hardware is pretty damned fast. Some vendors
even build highish-throughput firewalls and proxies out of PC class
hardware. :) The "wah wah PC class hardware has anemic bus IO/memory IO/
CPU speed/ethernet modules and is thus too crap for serious routing" argument
is pretty much over for at least 1 mil pps, perhaps more.

2c,

Adrian