Mixing Gigabit, Copper, and Linux

iampgray writes: "With copper-based gigabit cards selling for less than $36 these days, what kind of performance can you expect -- especially in the often-overlooked Linux market? We sought out to test exactly what you could expect from copper-based gigabit solutoins for the desktop interface through the cluster-targeted products. Name brands and off-brands were put through the wringer. How'd they fare? Interesting results to say the least."

Comments

Re:Huh.

[WolfWithoutAClause]

> Are we even to the point when a normal PC could handle Gigabyte?

Yes. Some memory parts are 333 Mhz and are 4 bytes parallel and instructions/s (as opposed to the clock rate) is over 1 GIP I think. So a PC can just about knock out a gigabyte/s if it has to, but it hasn't got much time to think about anything.

But this article is talking about gigaBITs/s. That's 8x slower. So that too.

Great uses for gigabit Ethernet on Linux

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Gigabit Ethernet comes in really handy on Linux when you add 802.11q VLAN tagging.

For those of you who don't know how this works, here's a bit of a primer: basically, you set the port on your big data center grade switch to "trunk" and then you enable 802.1q on your Linux box. Then you don't just have one Ethernet interface with one address --- you have up to 4096 virtual ones, each on its own VLAN and each with an IP address that's valid on that VLAN. So you'd have eth0.1, eth0.2, eth0.3, etc... each talking to the machines on that VLAN.

Once you've got that running, you can do all sorts of neat stuff, including:

• A router! You're on every VLAN anyway, so why not? It's not nearly as fast as a hardware-based Layer 3 switching module, but it's several orders of magnitude cheaper.
• Really complex firewalls. You could put different parts of your organization (or whatever) on different VLAN's and then use your nifty Linux box to dictate what kind of policy is used to route between them.
• If you're in a big building with multiple tenants, each with their own VLAN on a shared network, you can reduce the number of Internet access NAT/firewall boxes. Instead of one for each tenant, you've got a single one.
• How about a VPN gateway that can place the caller directly on his or her department's own VLAN instead of having to route to it?

As you can see, it's limited only by your imagination. And with that much stuff potentially running through the box, you're going to need that 1 Gbps of speed. Happy hacking!