Dan Hollis wrote:
right. what i'm pointing out is that if Imagestream routers really ARE capable of >OC12 (and perhaps multiple of them) then its unlikely its s/w-based forwarding.
doesnt mean they are violating GPL to do it. look at nvidia for example.
agree. all i'm saying is that it is "unlikely". OC12 at minimum-packet-size is a little over 3.2M PPS unidirectional traffic. bidirectional its 6.4M PPS. it is very unlikely that a non-modified linux kernel can do anywhere near that. its also incredibly unlikely that even a modified kernel could do that. the only possible scenario where i can see unmodified linux doing that is if you used "Fast Routing" which essentially is DMAing from one NIC to another, removing any ability to do any fancy queueing, no ability to do ACLs or any form of traffic accounting. in terms of 'router characterization', i doubt most folks would want such a thing on either a core-router, peering-router, transit-router or aggregation router. so: i'd say its far more likely that its h/w-based forwarding, perhaps FPGA-based. cheers, lincoln.