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From: Wojciech Puchar <wojtek@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl>
To: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org>
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Cc: martes@mgwigglesworth.com, freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Network Stack Code Re-write (Possible motivations...?)
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> I very much doubt that marketing issues were a significant issue.
> Off-the-shelf OS networking has always fallen short of supporting

it wasn't made for that.

> As someone else already mentioned in this thread, supporting hardware
> offload for forwarding is a major issue.  Core routers (or even
> provider-edge routers) depend on most of the packet forwarding being
> done in proprietary hardware. Operating system IP stacks don't support
> this very well; all of the routers I've worked on used the kernel IP
> stack only for packets going to and from the kernel itself, and used a
> different stack for what I call "transit" packets -- those that are
> only being forwarded by the local system.

as higher speed routers are "hardware" - why OS has to do ANY work on 
routing?

it's just there to prepare routing tables in format required for routing 
ASIC's and put them there!