Re: Software router state of the art

* Joe Greco:

I'm not sure where the claims about "{one, few} flow{s}" are coming from. Certainly the number of flows on a typical UNIX box acting as a router is not that relevant unless you specifically configure something like stateful firewalling, because the typical UNIX box simply doesn't have a *concept* of "flows." It deals with packets.

You are mistaken. Linux routing is flow-based. Ever wondered what those "dst cache overflow" messages mean you see during a DoS attack? It's the flow cache complaining that it can't expire records in an organic manner. I don't know much about FreeBSD. I think it got a route cache after FreeBSD 4, too. That's the reason why the FreeBSD 4 IP stack is still so popular.