I wonder how difficult it would be to integrate such a device on to an x86 board cheaply. Something like NetFPGA (http://netfpga.org/) would be an interesting place to start. The board has on board SRAM, a bit of DRAM, an FPGA, and 2 GigE interfaces. I know it definitely isn't normal for Network Operators to fund research like this, but it would still be fairly interesting if there was an Open Router Consortium (something for Vyatta to start?) with hardware acceleration to X86 routers. Possibly even making Quagga a mainstream control plane. Right now Quagga is controlled by a few engineers from Sun. This nearly produces a conflict on interest (Sun used to have their own routing platform). Anyways, to end my rambling... As network operators would you finance a low, medium end router with decent ROI. The question for developers (Vyatta primarily), could you do what Digium did for Asterisk--become business front, and provide platforms for Asterisk deployment in the enterprise--for Quagga, Linux, etc? William Herrin wrote:
On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 4:26 PM, Sargun Dhillon <sdhillon@decarta.com> wrote:
from a viewpoint of hardware, x86 is a fairly decent platform. I can stuff 40 (4x10GigE multiplex with a switch) 1 GigE ports in it. Though, the way that Linux works, it cannot handle high packet rates.
Correction: The way DRAM works, it cannot handle high packet rates. Also note that the PCI-X bus tops out in the 7 to 8 gbps range and it's half-duplex.
High-rate routers try to keep the packets in an SRAM queue and instead of looking up destinations in a DRAM-based radix tree, they use a special memory device called a TCAM.
http://www.pagiamtzis.com/cam/camintro.html
Regards. Bill Herrin
-- +1.925.202.9485 Sargun Dhillon deCarta sdhillon@decarta.com www.decarta.com