Linux router network cards

Thu Oct 22 22:19:20 UTC 2020

Chelsio cards are probably what you are looking for.

https://www.chelsio.com/terminator-6-asic/

It's closer to an asic than a traditional nic as the router/firewall rules
are pushed directly into the hardware.

I don't know how good they are with linux and they seem to be compatible.
https://www.chelsio.com/linux/

You will need to mess around a bit and fiddle here and there. If you don't
mind using FreeBSD instead of linux, you could achieve a smoother and more
integrated experience.

Jean

-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+jean=ddostest.me at nanog.org> On Behalf Of micah
anderson
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2020 5:31 PM
To: Philip Loenneker <Philip.Loenneker at tasmanet.com.au>; NANOG
<nanog at nanog.org>
Subject: RE: Linux router network cards

Thanks for the reply.

Philip Loenneker <Philip.Loenneker at tasmanet.com.au> writes:
> 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

>From what I can tell, SR-IOV/PVRDMA aren't really useful for me in building
a router that wont be doing any virtualization.

If the card can do DPDK, can it do XDP?

> 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.

Yeah, this wont be a virtualized environment, just a router passing packets,
dropping them, handling bgp and collecting flows.

-- 
        micah