3 ms·
People are also spending hundreds of billions of dollars on equipment like routers ever year. These could be Linux boxes if the kernel had sensible performance.
by lukego 11y ago
People are also spending hundreds of billions of dollars on equipment like routers ever year. These could be Linux boxes if the kernel had sensible performance.
I am kind of amazed that the Linux kernel did not become the dominant data-plane for the networking industry ahead of proprietary implementations from Cisco, Juniper, etc.
Hopefully Snabb Switch will have better luck there... ;-)
- asdfaoeu 11y agoASICs are always going to be way faster than a Linux kernel.
- __d 11y agoMost switch/router dataplane processing is done in hardware, with control by custom drivers in the control-plane OS. Cisco IOS is variously hosted on a proprietary real-time OS, QNX or Linux. Juniper JunOS is FreeBSD-based. Arista AOS is Linux-based. With the advent of SDN, the packet-rate limitations of a general-purpose OS lead to things like DPDK and Snabb, but they both run within a Linux host environment (DPDK can use FreeBSD as well; not sure re: Snabb).