Linux router network cards

Wed Oct 21 04:37:25 UTC 2020

Hi Micah,

Take a look at the Mellanox ConnectX 5 series of cards. They handle DPDK, PVRDMA (basically SR-IOV that allows live migration between hosts), and can even process packets within the NIC for some models. They did a fantastic presentation at AusNOG 2019 which showed off a lot of the features. We tried some out with Vmware and could get 20Gbps throughput (limited by the 2x 10G NICs we had configured) to a VM running Linux with DPDK+VPP.

The slidedeck for the presentation is here:
https://www.ausnog.net/sites/default/files/ausnog-2019/presentations/1.9_Rhod_Brown_AusNOG2019.pdf

It's heavily targeting virtualised workloads but some of the feature sets apply to bare-metal uses too.

Regards,
Philip Loenneker | Senior Network Engineer | TasmaNet

-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+philip.loenneker=tasmanet.com.au at nanog.org> On Behalf Of micah anderson
Sent: Wednesday, 21 October 2020 2:37 PM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Linux router network cards

I'm looking around for networking cards to build a linux based router. It needs to be able to do XDP, multiqueues, have good in-kernel driver support and be able to handle 10Gbe with good offloading for dealing with high packets per second.

What features should I be looking for to really optimize things for a three transit setup, with full tables.

Something like the Intel XL710-QDA2 card maybe?

-- 
        micah