Lots of types interfaces? EIGRP? Things that Linux/PC does have is Hard drives that fail, etc; I guess you could do a flash thing, though. Other protocols, like IPX, Dec, ATalk, etc are not going to happen.
Will you please point out other router than cisco which has EIGRP ? What kind of interface do you want ? You have async (multiport async), sync, ethernet, fddi and now atm is coming. BTW, do you get arcnet with cisco ? :-) IPX and appletalk have been there for a _long_ time. There is also a Linux DECNET project.
Also, for a long time, Linux had a hard time with lots or routes.
Define lots. You want full BGP table in a PC router ? Why :) ? Without any claims that it's a lot, our machine has 450+ routes, does BGP and OSPF with 3 NICs, constantly handles over 1Mbps data and it is a 486/66 with 16M RAM. A 2500 died when it was flooded with small packets, linux survived. I'm sure the box would still be ok when the load will double (probably won't see the day, though :)
If you are going to use a PC as a router, use an Unix that has real net code, like xBSD.
*shit. You have no clues. Linux was better at networking than BSD even in 1.2.x days ... All the limitations of the Linux/PC router are due to the PC hardware architecture. As seen on the list, people put 8 cards in the same PC. This exceeds the bus speed of a PC. Even a single 100Mbps NIC kills the PCI bus in most PCs should it run full speed. Also, you have to be very carefull with the NIC you choose. PCs simply were not built for forwarding packets and fast I/O. Of course a Linux/PC will never beat a cisco :-) but the cost is sometimes an order of magnitude lower for roughly the same performance. -- Matei CONOVICI, cmatei@roedu.net