Freebsd IP Forwarding performance (question, and some info) [7-stable, current, em, smp]

[Chris Marlatt]

Bart Van Kerckhove wrote:
> The netfpga site seems more or less dead - is this project still alive?
> It does look like a very interesting idea, even though it's currently quite
> linux-centric (and according to docs doesn't have VLAN nor ip6 support, the
> former being quite a dealbreaker)
> 

Just last Thursday they made another release so it certainly doesn't 
look dead. I've been following the project for awhile now to see where 
it's going to go. The lack of FreeBSD support isn't great but I doubt 
it's going to happen until someone steps up and makes it so. The same is 
likely true for VLAN support. So far it's primarily been a proof of 
concept from what I can tell and could be molded into any number of 
different applications with the appropriate support.

Considering all high performance routing platforms separate the 
management and routing/switching into two (or more) different hardware 
sections it wouldn't surprise me at all to see this as the only real 
option to get some serious routing and firewalling performance out of 
i386/amd64 type servers. Throwing faster and faster cpus at it is only 
going to get you so far (re: opteron 2212 vs 2222). Even so, 1.1Mpps is 
a considerable rate.

Regards,

	Chris