North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Level3 Question
i think you misunderstand the h/w / s/w distinction here. BGP is a 'control-plane'-driven protocol. control-plane = software. no vendor would have BGP "in hardware" per-se (although its forseeable that they may have 'AS# accounting for netflow' in h/w and that may be limited to addressing 16-bits). "forwarding a packet" (i.e. data-plane path) is typically in h/w in many {modern,large} routers. even if the routing protocol is based on AS#s, forwarding is typically based on a RIB creating a FIB. a FIB typically doesn't contain AS# information as there is no need to - you're not 'forwarding' on AS#, you're forwarding on Destination address. i think the distinction of "old hardware" that the original poster was trying to make was really one of things like RAM and Flash RAM space. if we take "Cisco routers" as an example, it may be that 32-bit AS# support mandates the use of the fictional IOS 12.666S software train which probably won't fit in the 16MB RAM and 16MB FLash on a 15-year-old c2500 series router. cheers, lincoln. NB. obvious 12.666S is fictional. don't try to read anything into that. and if its not obvious, no i'm not officially talking for Cisco. Wayne E. Bouchard wrote: Okay, so as people pointed out, I forgot that hardware engineers like to make assumptions about software for the sake of efficiency in ASICs and the like. So add a few exponents of pain. Still shouldn't be *all* that bad I wouldn't think. On Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 03:19:45PM -0700, Wayne E. Bouchard wrote:On Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 09:41:49PM +0000, Per Gregers Bilse wrote:On Nov 11, 1:14pm [email protected] wrote:The only way to get 32-bit AS number support deployed is to run out of AS numbers in
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