Date: 23 Oct 1997 14:50:37 -0700 From: Tony Li <tli@juniper.net> To: damian@cablenet.net (Damian Hamill) Cc: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Routing thru a FreeBSD? Message-ID: <82iuuoi1xu.fsf@chimp.juniper.net> In-Reply-To: damian@cablenet.net's message of 23 Oct 97 12:58:57 GMT References: <Pine.GSO.3.96.971022103105.26211B-100000@slip-3> <344F4A11.353C51DE@cablenet.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
damian@cablenet.net (Damian Hamill) writes: > I think you misunderstood his question. He didn't ask about ethernet > switching, he asked about IP routing. > > I doubt it. Unless there is specialized hardware involved. > > cisco and others have invested heavily in 'silicon switching'. > > there are more layer 3 ethernet switches out there. In fact, Cisco has been doing hardware based L3 forwarding for several years. The first such instance was the Silicon Switch Engine for the 7000. I happen to have a passing familiarity with it. ;-) Ob FreeBSD: The point here is that at some point, when you need many hundreds of thousands of PPS of forwarding, normal processors just fail to provide the necessary speed. Note that for most situations, this is not necessary. A heavily hacked FreeBSD system can get around 100Kpps. Of course at this point, you also run out of PCI bandwidth, so you've maxed out the rest of the hardware too. Tony
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?82iuuoi1xu.fsf>