On Tue, Apr 10, 2001 at 05:28:21PM -0400, Henry Yen wrote:

...

.. actually, if only the PCI bus were faster, I'm sure someone could build a GigE linerate router running under FreeBSD or Linux.

OC192 would probably want something a little more dedicated than a PCI bus. But then, thats what a Juniper is for, right? :-)

i always thought the JUNOS was basically FreeBSD with the routing table code re-written. the remarks about freenix being able/unable to run at these speeds (hardware bus notwithstanding) seem out of place, as i think the real sleight-of-packet happens on hardware blades; the supervisory operating system doesn't play much of a part here.

Ignoring the (incorrect) Juniper references for now because they are trying to do bigger and better things (if you want to fill a box with OC192 or 10GigE this is not an option), the only flatout "limitation" really is bus speed. There is no reason you can't do sufficient longest prefix match lookups to route a gigabit, or process packets fast enough. Infact if you were really serious, the Netgear GA620 card is really an Alteon Tigon 2 and the firmware code is open source. There is absolutily no reason you can't do packet processing on the card itself, and DMA the packet data directly to another card. You could implement near linerate filtering, duplicate dCEF on the card itself, and lots of other nifty tricks... None of these things are technically or programably unfeasable. Of course you would probably immediately take this little box which cost you next to nothing to produce and sell it for the same obscene amounts that most imbedded FreeBSD systems go for, to people who didn't understand the technology. Like I said, just because YOU don't know how to do it with the OS you've always installed and a perl script does not mean it can't be done. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)