[106127] in North American Network Operators' Group

home help back first fref pref prev next nref lref last post

Re: Software router state of the art

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Adrian Chadd)
Wed Jul 23 12:18:37 2008

Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:17:40 +0800
From: Adrian Chadd <adrian@creative.net.au>
To: Charles Wyble <charles@thewybles.com>
In-Reply-To: <48874FFF.4020205@thewybles.com>
Cc: zzuser@yahoo.com, nanog@merit.edu
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008, Charles Wyble wrote:

> This might be of interest:
> 
> http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/tmp/vrouter-perf.pdf

Various FreeBSD related guys are working on parallelising the forwarding
layer enough to use the multiple tx/rx queues in some chipsets such as the
Intel gig/10ge stuff.

1 mil pps has been broken that way, but it uses lots of cores to get there.
(8, I think?)

Linux apparently is/has headed down this path.

If someone were to spend some time dissecting the rest of the code to
also optimise the single-core throughput then you may see some interesting
software routers using commodity hardware (for values of "commodity"
roughly equal to "PC servers", rather than "magic lotsacore core MIPS with
some extra glue for jacking packets around."

Sure its not a CRS-1, but reliably doing a mil pps with a smattering of
low-touch features would be rather useful, no?

(Then, add say, l2tp/ppp into that mix, just as a crazy on-topic example..)



Adrian



home help back first fref pref prev next nref lref last post