Date: Wed, 29 May 2002 18:08:28 +0200 From: Andre Oppermann <oppermann@pipeline.ch> To: "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM> Cc: Attila Nagy <bra@fsn.hu>, Luigi Iannone <Luigi.Iannone@lip6.fr>, freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: MPLS Message-ID: <3CF4FCFC.3D760508@pipeline.ch> References: <Pine.NEB.4.44.0205290915060.28431-100000@tibre.lip6.fr> <Pine.LNX.4.44.0205291108080.7798-100000@scribble.fsn.hu> <3CF4A64A.EE220611@pipeline.ch> <200205291413.g4TEDLRG075458@whizzo.transsys.com> <3CF4E483.2510639@pipeline.ch> <200205291522.g4TFMdRG076033@whizzo.transsys.com>
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"Louis A. Mamakos" wrote: > > > If there is no kind of software involved on the forwarding plane > > then I don't know how the control plane can communicate via ethernet > > with the line cards... The internal communication in the router is > > via ethernet. > > To be clear, "forwarding plane" to me means the machinary which > causes packets that are received on one network interface on the > router to be routed and sent out another (or same) interface on > the router. "Control plane" is the stuff which executes the > routing protocols, and does various management tasks in the > router, including setting up forwarding tables used by the ASIC > hardware. Agreed. > The control plane (e.g., the route processor) is connected to > the forwarding infrastructure so it's able to send and receive > traffic via the other ports on the box. Agreed. > Do not confuse the ethernet on the control processor with the > "real" (Gigabit) Ethernet interfaces which plug into the line cards. > They source and sink traffic just like the various other line card > interfaces (various POS and ATM interfaces.) No, I don't confuse that. What I'm saying is that the box is doing it's internal communication via Ethernet. > Also, there's no fowarding table on the line cards, either. The > ASIC (one on the M5, M10, M20 and M40, 4 on the M160) are associated > with the backplane of the router. > > Further detail may be covered by non-disclosure agreements which > I'm subject to. > > > > The forwarding is done in Juniper's custom designed ASIC hardware, > > > and is the other significantly valuable intellectual property > > > they have along with the routing protocol implementation (e.g., > > > BGP, IS-IS, etc.) > > > > I agree with the ASIC hardware. But the BGP implementation smells > > awfully like gated (Nexthop). Anyway, a BGP deamon isn't that hard > > to write. > > Please don't take this the wrong way, but this sounds like a statement > from someone that's never done it before. In my professional role, We've done worse things than that. Some of the stuff we've done you can find on http://www.bgpdns.org. This is only the public stuff. We have more stuff in the works which I can't talk about yet. But you'll see some of the network stack work in FreeBSD if it gets adopted. (We is me and another code monkey). > I've seen literally a dozen or more vendors get the routing protocol > implementation Really Wrong. Sure, building and parsing BGP protocol > packet isn't that hard; the interesting bit is the policy machinary > which filters and computes routes. For a router in the default-free > core of the Internet, this is a rather daunting task. While the > JunOS implementation might smell like gated, it has significantly > more functionality and reliability than /usr/ports/net/gated does. It's clear to me that this is not based on the old 3.6 gated that is have in ports. The Nexthop stuff is more advanced. Zebra also is very reliable and I use it on many FreeBSD based routers here around. Agreed, each of these things don't push more than 50Mbit/s. But that is basically a problem of the old BSD network stack / crappy kernel routing (for- warding) table. Expect some nice work in this area in the next few month. -- Andre To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message
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