[109940] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Gigabit Linux Routers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Adrian Chadd)
Wed Dec 17 12:23:43 2008
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2008 02:23:37 +0900
From: Adrian Chadd <adrian@creative.net.au>
To: Chris <chris@ghostbusters.co.uk>
In-Reply-To: <c8a7026b0812170917m735afb53l4530dc998b674a9c@mail.gmail.com>
Cc: nanog list <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
On Wed, Dec 17, 2008, Chris wrote:
> All the responses have been really helpful. Thanks to everyone for being
> friendly and for taking the time to answer in detail.
> I've asked a hardware provider to quote for a couple of x86 boxes and I'll
> look for suitable Intel NICs too.
>
> Jim: We're a very small ISP and have a full mix of packet sizes on the
> network but the vast majority is outbound on port 80 so hopefully that'll
> help.
>
> Any more input will of course be considered. I may post the NIC models for
> approval if I'm scratching my head again :)
Just FYI, the more recent Intel hardware has multiple hardware TX/RX queues,
implemented via seperate (IIRC) PCIe channels, and Linux/FreeBSD is growing
support to handle these multiple queues via multiple kernel threads. Ie,
multiple CPUs handling packet forwarding.
The trick is whether they can pull it off in a way that scales the FIB
and RIB lookups and updates across 4 core (and more) boxes.
But 40kpps is absolutely doable on one CPU. Some of the FreeBSD guys working
on it are looking at supporting 1mil pps + on 10GE cards (in the public source
tree), so .. :)
Adrian
