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XORP 1.0 Released

Posted by michael on from the bit-bucket dept.

Mark Handley writes "XORP is the eXtensible Open Router Platform - an open-source router software stack for FreeBSD and Linux. It's designed from scratch to be extensible, so you can write your own router applications that play nicely with the existing routing protocols. We just released XORP 1.0! There's also a Live CD if you want to try it out without reinstalling your machine. More details in this CNET article."

2 of 76 comments (clear)

  1. Gated skirted over by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Gated got a mention in the CNET article. It was actually a very good alternative to the commercial vendor hardware - argueably many ISPs (that are around today, eg Demon Internet in the UK) would never have been able to start up if it were not for the existance of Gated.

    Unfortunately this was an example of a kinda BSD-style licence causing problems. The Gated community (which cost a couple of thousand pounds per year to join, providing access to all code/updates) added a great deal of functionality to the code, and benefited from this.

    The whole code was subsequently taken and "owned" by NextHop, meaning most/all of these code benefits were lost. Take a look at the gated.org website to see what happened :(

    - Ivan

  2. Performance is pretty reasonable by Fzz · · Score: 5, Informative
    I don't have results for a new machine with PCI-Express, but a regular 1GHz-class x86 PCs with 32 bit PCI tops out at about 400K minimum-size packets per second. This is limited by PCI saturation - you get fairly low PCI utilization with small packets. But even so, a $300 PC compares favourably with something like a Cisco 7206VXR (which cost ~$30K about 3-4 years ago). This is assuming you are smart about using interface polling rather that being interrupt-driven. Otherwise you die from interrupt livelock.

    This is plenty fast enough for most edge routers, but clearly not going to compete with a Cisco CRS-1 or Juniper core router.

    But most of the software in a router is control-plane (routing protocols and the like) and this is what XORP has focussed on to-date. As more people get involved with the project, we'll be able to do more things.

    A decade ago no-one thought we'd be running Linux on a supercomputer. But we are. If we can get to the point where XORP is stable enough and fully featured enough for carrier-grade routers, who knows what hardware people will run it on in a few years time.

    We are however very committed to keeping XORP as an open-source platform. No matter who uses it commercially, in the long run the only way to open up the router software market is for many boxes from many vendors to run a common open base software platform. With luck and with a lot of help, maybe that can be XORP.

    - Mark Handley, XORP Project