ISPs?

[Christian Meutes]

Hi,

--On Donnerstag, 19. März 2009 12:56 -0400 Robert Blayzor 
<rblayzor.bulk at inoc.net> wrote:

> I'm sure FreeBSD (or any *nix based platform for that matter) can
> probably smoke most routers control planes when it comes to routing
> tables and convergence if properly built on the right hardware.  Take one
> quad core processor with 4GB of RAM and you can probably handle 100's if
> not thousands of peers and a dozen+ full route views.

true, in theory a uptodate x86 CPU is very fast in software stuff and should
handle hundred of peers without any problems. But what is with the reality?
Its not only about hardware, its about the right implementation too. We all
know how "fast" and "bugfree" windows is on highend PCs ;-)

> The big question is PPS forwarding.  Where most high performance routers
> do this with ASIC's, the actual packet forwarding THROUGH the device is
> in hardware and completely off the CPU.... FreeBSD has to do it in
> software, so that's where it loses BIG.

Ciscos new software platform, the ASR1000, does everything in software. Its
in theory the perfect edge device, if it would be already bugfree and would
have all the features and hardware support the others have. I believe it 
routes
linerate 10GE, can has ACLs, QoS and all the sophisticated stuff enabled at
the same time.

Beside pps in which iam very interested its also operation of routers 
without
downtime in cause of small configuration changes.