3 ms·

I was quite confused by the article. It's old news. As one of the comments there said: Custom ICs for networking were first developed decades ago. Everything f

I was quite confused by the article. It's old news. As one of the comments there said: Custom ICs for networking were first developed decades ago. Everything from carrier class routers to home routers contain networking ASICs. Cisco and Juniper consume many ASICs.

wmf 10y ago
The article is a rebuttal to NFV hype that proposes to run all firewalls, NAT, IDS, IPS, DPI, VPN, SD-WAN, etc. in software.
- snuxoll 10y ago
  As bandwidth goes up general purpose CPU's become inefficient at handling traffic again. Hell, pfSense on my Xeon E5-2403v2 at home eats up 25% of a CPU core WITH TSO and TCO enabled when maxing out my 100Mbps, meanwhile my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X running on a whimpy little lower-power embedded processor sits around 2% utilization doing the same task. This is without any crazy firewall rules, IDS, etc, just three port forwards in place. I can't imagine what kind of hardware I'd need to even handle a 1Gbps with software routing, let alone handling the duties of my 24-port TP-Link switch at home that sips ~20W of power with all ports active and can handily route (and yes, I mean route, it is a Layer 3 switch) 1mpps.
  - gonzo 10y ago
    Netmap-fwd on an atom is faster than your edge router. And yes'm pfsense is getting some netmap/dpdk love. I am the owner of Netgate (company behind pfsense) And your figures ar full of shit. I do 1gbps on a 2.4GHz Atom
    - snuxoll 10y ago
      To be fair, this was running on ESXi, so there was a performance penalty to be had there. Got really annoyed when I switched to XenServer and I had to disable all hardware offloading (because XenServer is stupid and FreeBSD doesn't like stupid virtio drivers) and it would regularly peg a core at 100% when maxing out the connection, which was ultimately why I switched to a cheap hardware solution (still eyeing the cheap ~$300 pfSense appliance, because EdgeOS lacks a TON of features I used regularly). Edit: Netmap would be lovely.
  - tremon 10y ago
    pfSense on my Xeon E5-2403v2 at home eats up 25% of a CPU core WITH TSO and TCO enabled when maxing out my 100Mbps That sounds like thermal throttling, or software failure. There is no way a single 100Mbps link can come close to making a current CPU sweat.
    - snuxoll 10y ago
      This is a ThinkServer TD340, if it was thermal I would actually hear the fans - it remains whisper quiet. To be fair, this is virtualized, so there's a 3% performance penalty give or take.
  - chriscappuccio 10y ago
    TSO doesn't help your router, sorry. What is TCO? 25% of one core at 100Mbps? How many pps? (This doesn't mean that your limit is 400Mbps per core, far from it.)
    - snuxoll 10y ago
      TCP Checksum Offloading, important in NAT since it has to re-checksum each packet that it rewrites. This was just running speedtest.net, can't say I bothered to measure the packet rate because a normal HTTP download had the same effect. I ended up running into more issues when I switched from ESXi to XenServer so I don't really have the ability to recreate the results, I would probably have fewer issues if it was running on bare metal (and I'll probably switch to that eventually).

wmf 10y ago

The article is a rebuttal to NFV hype that proposes to run all firewalls, NAT, IDS, IPS, DPI, VPN, SD-WAN, etc. in software.

snuxoll 10y ago
As bandwidth goes up general purpose CPU's become inefficient at handling traffic again. Hell, pfSense on my Xeon E5-2403v2 at home eats up 25% of a CPU core WITH TSO and TCO enabled when maxing out my 100Mbps, meanwhile my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X running on a whimpy little lower-power embedded processor sits around 2% utilization doing the same task. This is without any crazy firewall rules, IDS, etc, just three port forwards in place. I can't imagine what kind of hardware I'd need to even handle a 1Gbps with software routing, let alone handling the duties of my 24-port TP-Link switch at home that sips ~20W of power with all ports active and can handily route (and yes, I mean route, it is a Layer 3 switch) 1mpps.
- gonzo 10y ago
  Netmap-fwd on an atom is faster than your edge router. And yes'm pfsense is getting some netmap/dpdk love. I am the owner of Netgate (company behind pfsense) And your figures ar full of shit. I do 1gbps on a 2.4GHz Atom
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    To be fair, this was running on ESXi, so there was a performance penalty to be had there. Got really annoyed when I switched to XenServer and I had to disable all hardware offloading (because XenServer is stupid and FreeBSD doesn't like stupid virtio drivers) and it would regularly peg a core at 100% when maxing out the connection, which was ultimately why I switched to a cheap hardware solution (still eyeing the cheap ~$300 pfSense appliance, because EdgeOS lacks a TON of features I used regularly). Edit: Netmap would be lovely.
- tremon 10y ago
  pfSense on my Xeon E5-2403v2 at home eats up 25% of a CPU core WITH TSO and TCO enabled when maxing out my 100Mbps That sounds like thermal throttling, or software failure. There is no way a single 100Mbps link can come close to making a current CPU sweat.
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    This is a ThinkServer TD340, if it was thermal I would actually hear the fans - it remains whisper quiet. To be fair, this is virtualized, so there's a 3% performance penalty give or take.
- chriscappuccio 10y ago
  TSO doesn't help your router, sorry. What is TCO? 25% of one core at 100Mbps? How many pps? (This doesn't mean that your limit is 400Mbps per core, far from it.)
  - snuxoll 10y ago
    TCP Checksum Offloading, important in NAT since it has to re-checksum each packet that it rewrites. This was just running speedtest.net, can't say I bothered to measure the packet rate because a normal HTTP download had the same effect. I ended up running into more issues when I switched from ESXi to XenServer so I don't really have the ability to recreate the results, I would probably have fewer issues if it was running on bare metal (and I'll probably switch to that eventually).