FreeBSD as router - performance vs hardware routers

[Kenneth Culver]

> As a Note, the top end routers out there, Junipers, run JunOS, which is
> a FreeBSD variant. A Juniper M160 can route OC192's at wire speed
> (That's 10Gb/s folks).

However, the way those are set up, FreeBSD doesn't do the actual routing,
as far as I can remember they upload a routing table to the line cards and
transfer any changes to the routing table to the line cards, so the
routing itself is done by high-speed hardware, and FreeBSD is mainly
managing all the custom hardware. We did a similar thing when I worked for
Ericsson with FreeBSD.

Ken