[84607] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: image stream routers
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (tony sarendal)
Sat Sep 17 12:34:49 2005
Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 17:34:18 +0100
From: tony sarendal <dualcyclone@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dualcyclone@gmail.com
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <432BB534.5030704@interlink.com.au>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On 17/09/05, Lincoln Dale <ltd@interlink.com.au> wrote:
>=20
> Christopher J. Wolff wrote:
> > I'd be interested to know the relative pros and cons of switching packe=
ts in
> > software (Imagestream) versus handing them off to a dedicated ASIC (Cis=
co,
> > Juniper)
>=20
> [without having looked at Imagestream in any way, shape or form..]
>=20
> it would be _unlikely_ that any router vendor that wants to support >OC3
> could do so with the 'standard' (non-modified) linux IP stack. if they
> are modifying the 'standard' linux IP stack then its very unlikely that
> one could do so without having to publish the source-code to it. (i.e.
> as per GPL).
>=20
> 'standard' linux on standard hardware isn't capable of much more than
> 100K PPS. sure - some folks have a few hundred packets/sec - but these
> are minimalist versus the demonstrated performance of ASIC-based
> forwarding, typically 30M-50M PPS.
>=20
Regarding software based forwarding and pps old docs from the FreeBSD
guys claim that the 1Mpps barrier can be broken on a 2.8GHz XEON, with
todays standards a mediocer pc.
http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/FreeBSD-5.3-Networking.pdf=20
A collegue smartbits tested a 1GHz pc, with a full feed and 250k
simoultaneons flows it managed around 250kpps. This also with freebsd
and device polling. It sounds to me like a software based machine can
be plenty fast with good code under the hood.
/Tony
--=20
Tony Sarendal - dualcyclone@gmail.com
IP/Unix
-=3D The scorpion replied,
"I couldn't help it, it's my nature" =3D-
