On Mon, 20 Jul 2009, Edward B. DREGER wrote:
With a little creativity, it can _almost_ be done for IPv4.
That's most likely a big _almost_.
With an efficient FIB algorithm, a single core on a Xeon 5400 will exceed 30 million lookups per second for IPv4 -- full table and lots of peers.
When someone asks for "2600 class router" they probably also want WFQ/fairqueue/LLQ, L2TPv3, PPPoE and a heap of other things that impede pps quite a lot on a CPU based platform.
Of course, that fails to accomodate RIB maintenance and FIB updates. It also doesn't take into account modern SMP CPUs; the RIB-handling code is still under development.
If you can bring all (or most) of the IOS functionality into a modern Intel Xeon/i7 platform with all that memory access speed etc and you use all the cores efficiently, then you might be able to do a lot. I've heard a lot of claims before (Luleå Algorithm from Effnet for instance) but it never came to much because functionality/stability is everything, if I want a stupid pps forwarding device I might as well get myself an L3 switch, it'll use less power and have less parts that can break. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se