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0. Accept that for NAT on home gateway you really don't need wirespeed at minimal MTU, as the majority of your data transfers will be over TCP at max MSS/MTU.
by q3k 5y ago
0. Accept that for NAT on home gateway you really don't need wirespeed at minimal MTU, as the majority of your data transfers will be over TCP at max MSS/MTU.
1. Get a Xeon D box (like a Supermicro X10SDV-TLN4F, TDP 45W).
2. Install any Linux distribution on it and just use iptables/nftables. It's good enough.
3. You now have a normal Linux box with normal userspace networking, feel free to also run some more services on it without having to deal with DPDK getting in your way.
DPDK is nice and all if you absolutely need to scream through tiny packets at multi-dozen-gigabit speeds, but you almost certainly don't need it at home for Netflix and seeding Ubuntu ISOs.
- dragontamer 5y ago> 0. Accept that for NAT on home gateway you really don't need wirespeed at minimal MTU, as the majority of your data transfers will be over TCP at max MSS/MTU. This can't be true for video gamers? I'd assume most video game protocols are tiny UDP packets. But maybe video game protocols don't need "wirespeed", since they're actually quite efficient in terms of bytes transferred. But you want to minimize latency.
- q3k 5y agoI don't think any games rely on more than a few dozen megabits of Internet bandwidth at a few hundred packets per second. And that netfilter/iptables NAT on a Xeon is not gonna add more latency than the equivalent netfilter/iptables NAT that runs on a typical ARM/MIPS home gateway/router.
- Hikikomori 5y agoIt's not needed for games, they use a few megabits at most. We use the wirespeed term in the context of networking devices when discussing their limitations. If a device is wirespeed it's capable of routing or switching on all of its interfaces using the smallest packet size, for a 10Gbit interface that is 14.8m packets per second in one direction.