7206 VXR NPE-G1 throughput

Mon Feb 10 23:53:08 UTC 2014

Cisco once implemented and released this feature to use the second core of the NPE-G1, most notably to manage the BRAS & en/decapsulations tasks for LAC/LNS/PTA (PPPoE, L2TP...), effectively offering such 1.6 factor.
It was called MPF, and was released in special 12.3-YM IOS (in 2004/2005 I guess).
The first core was still running "normal" IOS while the second core was running a dedicated microcode (acting as some sort of data plane).

However several features were not available, and it was quite buggy and unstable (unless you only used the very minimum features implemented in the MPF microcode: no MSS adjust, no ACL for PPP sessions...).
It was quickly deprecated anyway.
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/routers/ps341/prod_end-of-life_notice0900aecd8067dd9f.html

Le 10 févr. 2014 à 21:38, Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at seacom.mu> a écrit :

> On Monday, February 10, 2014 07:58:16 PM Nick Hilliard 
> wrote:
> 
>> in fact, the npe-g1 uses a BCM1250 which is a dual CPU
>> unit but vanilla IOS is not able to use the second CPU
>> for packet forwarding.  Unsubstantiated rumour claimed
>> that modular IOS (QNX kernel) could push about 1.6x the
>> throughput of vanilla IOS, as it was smp capable.  Pity
>> it was never released.
> 
> Haha, you remind me of PXF (although that was the NSE-100 
> and NSE-150).
> 
> Mark.