North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Gigabit Linux Routers

  • From: Nathan Ward
  • Date: Wed Dec 17 17:08:02 2008

On 18/12/2008, at 3:02 AM, Chris wrote:

Hi All,
Sorry if this is a repeat topic. I've done a fair bit of trawling but can't
find anything concrete to base decisions on.


I'm hoping someone can offer some advice on suitable hardware and kernel
tweaks for using Linux as a router running bgpd via Quagga. We do this at
the moment and our box manages under the 100Mbps level very effectively.
Over the next year however we expect to push about 250Mbps outbound traffic
with very little inbound (50Mbps simultaneously) and I'm seeing differing
suggestions of what to do in order to move up to the 1Gbps level.


It seems even a dual core box with expensive NICs and some kernel tweaks
will accomplish this but we can't afford to get the hardware purchases
wrong. We'd be looking to buy one live and one standby box within the next
month or so. They will only run Quagga primarily with 'tc' for shaping.
We're in the UK if it makes any difference.


Any help massively appreciated, ideally from those doing the same in
production environments.


Give Click a try - it is an alternative forwarding plane for Linux, that ran much faster than regular Linux forwarding a few years ago, and I imagine would still do so.

The XORP routing suite supports various different FIBs, including Click.

http://read.cs.ucla.edu/click/

--
Nathan Ward