In the referenced message, measl@mfn.org said:
Any of the BSD derivatives will work fine. My personal preference being FreeBSD. Remember though, without significat hardware changes, the home x86/BSD/zebra solution is not going to work in a core environment - there are backplane throughput issues stopping you there. This should be considered as box for either the lab or the small lan/wan environment.
Yours, J.A. Terranson sysadmin@mfn.org
Of course, it is possible to only offload the best-path computations, and keep non-PC routers for packet forwarding. This in much the same way as the current route-servers operate. For IBGP, route-reflector clusters with the masters being zebra boxes, would probably work. For EBGP, mrtd is probably the best if you already express your routing policy in the IRR (public or private), or gated/zebra otherwise. Haven't tested in "real-life" but it seems workable.