I work at an ISP, we are starting to connect stuff at 40G (times 2 for redundancy) because we want a single machine to do more work. Improving the kernel would

I work at an ISP, we are starting to connect stuff at 40G (times 2 for redundancy) because we want a single machine to do more work. Improving the kernel would greatly speed up many of our applications with no real downsides. With 40G to the edge, we also need to be able to properly firewall/filter/and all that fun stuff the traffic!