What is good in modular routers these days?

Tue Jul 21 15:46:57 UTC 2009

FreeBSD has done work to optimize for 10gbps and they have a nice
netperf cluster for testing
http://www.freebsd.org/projects/netperf/cluster.html#resources

>From http://www.freebsd.org/features.html - "10Gbps network
optimization: With optimized device drivers from all major 10gbps
network vendors, FreeBSD 7.0 has seen extensive optimization of the
network stack for high performance workloads, including auto-scaling
socket buffers, TCP Segment Offload (TSO), Large Receive Offload (LRO),
direct network stack dispatch, and load balancing of TCP/IP workloads
over multiple CPUs on supporting 10gbps cards or when multiple network
interfaces are in use simultaneously. Full vendor support is available
from Chelsio, Intel, Myricom, and Neterion."

FreeBSD provides support for 802.11q, bgpd, ospfd, pf(firewall) and
ALTQ(QOS) but since I haven't tested it I have no idea what kind of real
world performance you can get with all these features in use.

This is one group trying to pony up at least with support of many major
vendors.

mark

-----Original Message-----
From: Adrian Chadd [mailto:adrian at creative.net.au] 
Sent: Monday, July 20, 2009 9:31 PM
To: William Pitcock
Cc: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: What is good in modular routers these days?

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009, William Pitcock wrote:

> I don't need any of that stuff, just BGP, OSPF and fast packet
> forwarding for IPv4.  But the point is that I need only routing
> functionality, I don't need switching functionality like on a Cisco
> 6500-class system.

I bet if you went and spoke to the right people in the correct
open source kernel/distribution project, -given the right clue-,
very fast forwarding and QoS could start appearing in *NIX OSes.

The problem I see is there's a lot of demand -once it is done-, but
no one org or group willing to pony up to see it happen.

The clue is out there. They're just looking for a way to pay the
rent.

Adrian

(Not looking to do this, I have enough going on atm..)