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Re: Open Source BGP-router?

  • From: Niels Bakker
  • Date: Thu Dec 06 12:04:39 2001 
* [email protected] (Jim Shankland) [Thu 06 Dec 2001, 17:28 CET]:
> Does anybody have any rough figures for what kind of load (both
> bytes/s total throughput and packets/s) a more or less vanilla x86
> running a free OS can handle today?  The last time I looked at this --

>From the FreeBSD commit logs of src/sys/i386/conf/NOTES (rev 1.961):

| Add device driver support for the Broadcom BCM570x family of gigabit
| ethernet controllers. This adds support for the 3Com 3c996-T, the
| SysKonnect SK-9D21 and SK-9D41, and the built-in gigE NICs on
| Dell PowerEdge 2550 servers. The latter configuration hauls ass:
| preliminary measurements show TCP speeds of over 900Mbps using
| only normal size frames.
| 
| TCP/IP checksum offload, jumbo frames and VLAN tag insertion/stripping
| are supported, as well as interrupt moderation.
| 
| Still need to fix autonegotiation support for 1000baseSX NICs, but
| beyond that, driver is pretty solid.


> Hypothetically, a box that could handle, say, 750 Mb/s is not suitable
> for "core" use, but it can certainly handle more than "a couple of
> T1s."

Depends on what your core looks like.  Note that the above were TCP
speeds, not packet forwarding speeds; I assume counts for the latter
would be slightly higher.

To save you some clicking, a PowerEdge 2550 is a 2U chassis with one of
those adapters on-board connected to a 64-bit 66 MHz PCI bus, three free
64-bit 33 MHz PCI slots, dual Pentium III CPUs and oodles of ECC 133 MHz
SDRAM with memory interleaving support.


Oh, and please note that I am staying very far away from a discussion
of PC vs. Cisco equipment quality and software reliability.  :-)

Regards,


	-- Niels.