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It'll be a combination of: 1. Throughput - say you use usb adapters, in a lot of ways usb is a shared bus so you'll run into max bandwidth quickly. This is e

It'll be a combination of: 1. Throughput - say you use usb adapters, in a lot of ways usb is a shared bus so you'll run into max bandwidth quickly. This is especially because data will have to go in and then out, all the way to the cpu 2. Latency - because you're using software to do switching, it'll add time to process each packet and send it back out tne right place. You've also go any other interface latency adding to it 3. Power usage - eacj adapter will have it's own full network phy and hardware, which will increase the power draw. Combined with all the extra processing above and now your power usage is even higher. This means you also loae out on hardware offloading and other performance enhancememts that generally reduce power usage because less of the system is involved in mocing packets around 4. Features (potentially) - this will depend a lot on the hardware you choose, some of those cheap gigabit usb adapters i've tried didn't work with vlans and other features properly. But if you say load up a bunch of nice pcie cards with 1 or more ports thst support everything (never had issues with pcie ones) then you can now actually get a lot of features that are otherwise difficult or impossible on simpler hardware (though at that point you're doing routing more tham switching, but thay flexibility is why you'd potentially do this).

Fnoord 2y ago
We're only talking 1 gbit ethernet here, so you can have multiple of those ports on PCIe. I have a PCIe card here with two 2.5 gbit on it (don't remember exactly how much it was on Ali but between 20 and 40 EUR) and I can saturate both with iperf3. Since the example only uses 4 ports, it should be easy to make a simple router with just two PCIe cards. But there's probably 4x 1 gbit PCIe out there, too. And if you use 1 gbit fiber, that wouldn't cost much power nor would it need much speed. If your uplink is DSL, you could use a VigorNIC 132.

Fnoord 2y ago

We're only talking 1 gbit ethernet here, so you can have multiple of those ports on PCIe. I have a PCIe card here with two 2.5 gbit on it (don't remember exactly how much it was on Ali but between 20 and 40 EUR) and I can saturate both with iperf3. Since the example only uses 4 ports, it should be easy to make a simple router with just two PCIe cards. But there's probably 4x 1 gbit PCIe out there, too. And if you use 1 gbit fiber, that wouldn't cost much power nor would it need much speed. If your uplink is DSL, you could use a VigorNIC 132.