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Linux Based Router
Troy Larsen
sent us a link to a yahoo press release proclaiming a company
selling a Linux Based Router.
Up to 40 gigs per second and up to 128 100mb ports. Yum.
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When my 200mhz pentium ran linux, it had trouble saturating my 100mb line. Switching to OpenBSD and I could saturate it easily. (same hardware)
:)
That and some recent NFR results showed that linux dropped 90% of the packets on a 47mp line whereas the BSD's dropped 5% and Solaris on an Ultra1
dropped > 10%.
Linux has one of the slowest IP stacks in the unix world (they should have kept their first stack, stolen from bsd
I don't release a set of patches to Linus
for the 2.2.x networking unless I can still
borderline with 11MB/sec on my Sparc 100baseT
network.
So what you have is probably a driver problem,
stop spreading FUD.
Later,
David S. Miller
davem@redhat.com
Just wondering...
Kurt
kwerle@pobox.com
The OS's forwarding performance is pretty much irrelevant. Anyone building a high-speed router is doing packet forwarding in hardware anyway.
As for a hacked gated being sufficiently robust, various products either on or coming to market say "yes." Note that the packet or bit rate (which is handled by hardware) is orthogonal to whether the routing protocol software is up to the job.
You are probably talking about LRP, the Linux Router Project. This distro is maintained by volunteer, not a commercial product. It has been featured in last month Linux Journal. Cool stuff, but nothing to do with this story.
With nifty things like I2o networking cards that can DMA to each other across the PCI bus and maybe even do some of the work of a network stack, it might be possible to build a Linux based router that doesn't depend on the CPU for everything, using an ordinary PC.
I read over this article and would very much like to see how their stats differ... can anyone summarize?
How about responding instead to the meat of this
persons posting instead of mentioning his side
comments?
You are the FUD source, go away please.
Later,
David S. Miller
davem@redhat.com
Not only the kernel fits on that 1 floppy, the entire system (shell, utilities, drivers, route server, PPP server ...)
It's really a nice piece of work. I used it to make a single disk ethernet sniffer (the fear of any public computer lab!)
...in some capacity in a new line of switches. A couple of months ago, they quielty dropped the project. Seems it didn't work out.
Sorry, don't have URLs handy.
MVS is in trouble. So says Yahoo, so says Motley Fool. Corel has also gone big on Linux, having tried Java. Another company in big trouble.
On the other side of the balance sheet, fairly successful hardware companies have been investing in Red Hat. Dell and IBM are hardly in dire straits.
Those that have little left to lose seem to grab onto Linux as a last chance at survival. Menawhile, successful hardware vendors get into Linux, seemingly to cover all bases. Those in between, stick with proprietary solutions. I think the middle is slowly shrinking, but time will tell.
Yes, I do have something useful to add.
The original poster showed how this problem
wrt NFR is indeed fixed. The original poster even
presented pointers to discussion lists and
patch sets as evidence of this.
Later,
David S. Miller
davem@redhat.com
But it does mention Gig Ethernet. - and the company (MRV/Xyplex/NBase) previously stated in Q2 Conference Call last year that they were working on OC-48,OC-192 - even OC-768, with introduction later in the year (perhaps just the first 2 by then).
>>MVS is in trouble. So says Yahoo, so says Motley Fool.
If Yahoo/Fool Boards say so, it must be true.
And the company name is MRV.
Dave,
:) In my followup, I was asking whether this 'jtn' person had anything useful to add... it wasn't meant as a response to your message.
I am the original poster
Thanks!
Yes, but on a much smaller scale - it's codename is STEELHEAD. It should be called PIPEDREAM.
They have something on a much smaller scale - it's codename is STEELHEAD. It should be called PIPEDREAM.
Mouhahahahahhahahahahhhahahahahah...The only way Windows NT could accomplish this would be to make this completely controlled by hardware. Windows NT would simply configure it and switch it on or off. :o)
Too much overhead in NT !!
http://www.fore.com/products/es/esx2448ts.html
FORE's layer-3 switches use NT 4.0 on their controller modules. Granted, the NT system can crash without the whole network going down, but much functionality is lost (such as remote management and route advertisements).
I just can't wait until they start using embedded NT for Boeing 757's...
We have DECNet running through our core, which
links the entire UMASS system statewide. It is
important for routers, as there are a lot of VAXen
out there that still have applications that need
it. Until they are all phased out, which judging
from the fact that we still have an even older MVS mainframe
means probably that will take quite a few years,
any router on our backbone needs DECNet.
Linux comes out on top for network features, because
the developers are spending less time finding benchmarks to promo it or FUD another OS, and more time coding for the good of the community.
You can probably get m68k linux to boot on some
of them with some work. The main problem is the
hardware -- no drivers for any of those nice cards,
I'm afraid. So it wouldn't be useful for much.
The last time I looked into a Cisco router (a 2503), it used a M68020 (or 040?) processor, came with some 8 megs flash for storing the system image and 16 for ram. The Ethernet was an AMD PCnet, and the ISDN controller was the common philips BRI.
I don't se why you could'n run m68k linux on that. It even has some nice 'revert to mini-ios'-settings, to restore a corrupted flash.
-Simentt@hotmail.com, never got around to creating an account
I have an account, but I'll be AC for obvious reasons.
I know some things about this project. I don't think gated is involved. NBase has its own OSPF software. Whether they can integrate this w/o running awry of the GPL is probably a better question.
The key phrase is led to believe.
Since Linux's networking code is completely new (not from old BSD code) it took a long time to catch up. Now it's quite a bit faster then free bsd (and the benchmarks prove it, in fact, Linux has the fastest network performance of any general purpose OS).
But that's not the point here.. Linux is just a configuration front end. All the routing is done in hardware. The linux box just config's it, and perhaps manages OSPF maps..
You said don't fly on a 757 if you value your life? thanks for the hint, i'll avoid them.
I seriusly and I mean SERIOUSLY hope that you are joking. THis would be a disasterous loss of life and a new fear of flying for people around the world. As traveling becomes more and more standard, this would be scary as hell to me.
Anyone heard of Juniper networks? Up to oc48, based on a BSD variant...
Linux advocates have for years now tried to convince us that if you press this key on a :-). If you point that out and tell them that "Hey, the emperor got now clothes on!" the die hard linux advocates may hit you with a FUD-stick.
linux box the computer will jump.
Anyone with a different view have been accused of beeing liars and told to "shut up".
NFR test
Linux is just another monolithic unix kernel nothing new about that. It is a huge project that is trying to rewrite things that has been done before and then called it inovation in the brave new world. Sometimes the rewriters don't get it right and the real thing show that is superiour and the truth hurts
Just my 0.2 euro
Nice to see that a free software project can outperform commercial companys. ;-)
Money can't buy you all
s/all/everything/g
BSD boxen aren't very good workstations. It's in the server realm that they allegedly shine. I haven't seen much of a performance difference, to be honest.
Its not the hardware you can identify that you have to worry about writing drivers for... :)
That AMD PCnet chip is probably just the management software's interface to get packets of the net... The chips you have to worry about are any FPGAs and custom ASICs.. There could be ten to a hundred which there is no way you are going to get the code for unless you hack the CISCO IOS software. If you do that, you better be prepared for trouble from CISCO...
you mean CRACKPIPEDREAM...
I remember when all the "Microsoft goes after cisco's turf" articles came out Ziff-MSPropagandaMachine-Davis publications.
I think the laughter at cisco could be heard as far away as Monta Ray.
...and for my own personal prospective on the subject, when some chucklehead calls me up to bail his ass out when RRAS stop routing packets due to an expired trial-period license install of NT, I usually put them on a hardware ISDN router (would use linux, but hell... the dumbasses couldn't handle NT... what in the hell would I trust them with linux).
Read the post one level up before you mention NFR please....
Most of the features you ask about aren't related to gated. Gated's not involved in the forwarding path, except in that it's in charge of populating the forwarding table. Likewise, it's not involved in L2 issues like HDLC, rate-limiting, and so on.
Regarding whether gated supports soft inbound and outbound bgp reconfig: Yes, gated has done that for years. It could do it long before cisco finally figured out how. The gated BGP implementation rocks.
Gives a whole new meaning to the term "system crash".
I can picture it on air traffic control now.
American 1452: Chicago Center, we've had a blue screen of death...request emergency routing to some airport.
Clearly there is an advantage for Cisco IOS or BSD in terms of support or even performance, but perhaps the advantage of a strong routing platform running an open source OS is in the applications that can run on top of it. If they are really going to let programmers hack around this machine and build the applications they need......this could be pretty neat
Open software has been used in gigabit-class
routers for quite some time. One of the
very first -- BBN's gigabit router -- used
BSD4.4.
It is important to understand that the OS
doesn't do the packet forwarding. That is
done by specialised ASICs. So the speed of,
or minor flaws in, the OS's IP stack are not
of much relevance.
What is more important is that the OS can
keep the routing processes running. These
processes exchange the route information
and load the hardware forwarding table that
the forwarding ASICs then look up.
There's a lot to be said for the reliability
of proven OSs and proven routing code rather
than building from scratch.
One of the major out-of-the-Labs applications
of UNIX in the early years was to supervise
the operation of telephone switches, so we
seem to be coming full circle.
do you have any useful comments to make about my post, or are you just going to criticize my ficticious example?
Let me clarify what I was trying to say:
1) NFR depends upon being able to read() a buffered stream of packets in order to do effective packet capture
2) Linux doesn't implement this
3) Therefore, Linux will perform very badly running NFR
4) The immediate conclusion to be drawn is NOT that Linux's TCP/IP stack sucks. (in fact, packet filtering has NOTHING to do with TCP/IP or any other network protocol)
5) Likewise, the fact that there is no DECnet support in OpenBSD, but there is in Linux 2.2, does NOT mean that OpenBSD's networking sucks.
Do you have anything useful to add?
QNX/Neutrino always struck me as the way the HURD should have been ( except, obviously, QNX is not Free Software)
QNX is incredibly robust. Maybe we could gravitate linux to protected device drivers, at least on intel and PPC - say ring 3 user space, ring 2/1 device drivers and modules , ring 0 kernel ?
( I may have the ring ordering back -to -front)
> That and some recent NFR results showed that
9 99/Feb/0110.html
> linux dropped 90% of the packets on a 47mp line
> whereas the BSD's dropped 5% and Solaris on an
> Ultra1 dropped > 10%.
NFR is written specifically for the Berkeley Packet Filter using read(), which Linux doesn't implement (Linux supports filtering but doesn't buffer the incoming packets to allow read()). End of story. Why don't you compare the speed of Linux 2.2 DECnet versus the DECnet in the latest OpenBSD while you're at it?
However, if you look at the latest patches from Alexey Kuznetsov on:
ftp://ftp.inr.ac.ru/ip-routing/lbl-tools
you will discover a kernel patch and a patch to libpcap labeled "turbo". This patch implements packet capture via a ring buffer shared between kernel and user space. This is something even BSD doesn't have- they must go through an additional buffer copy in the read() call.
This patch also eliminates 2 out of the 3 main problems with the Linux packet capture code outlined in this message from the NFR mailing list:
http://www.nfr.net/nfr/mail-archive/nfr-users/1
The remaining problem, #3, may or may not still be there, but only involves copying a few bytes here and there and so isn't a very big deal if it does exist.
It will be interesting how the different OSes stack up doing packet capture in the future.
I seem to recall that someone was building a Linux "router distro" based on Debian. Is that this company? I also hear that Debian thinks it is good for people to be taking their main distro and tweaking it for various special purpose apps. Are there any others I'm not aware of in the pipeline?
Posted by The hacker:
I think it is extremely great to have a Linux based router building by a big networking company.
I am sure they have BGP in their product since I used their (Nbase-Xyplex) fiber optic & Switches. They have all the features you just dream about in their product and it works just astonishing. Thus I am sure they will have BGP-4, POS and WDM in their Linux-based router.
I think that Linux-based router with a lot of features, an high performance and so scalable is a innovation to our ISPs community. So I think the idea to keep eyes on this product and watch it is right on place.
Posted by The hacker:
They do it again, after the first 10/100 ethernet switch they come again with the first Linux-based switch router - WOH.
I think it is extremely great to have a Linux-based router building by a networking company.
I am sure they (Nbase-Xyplex) have all the features in their product since I used their (Nbase-Xyplex) Fiber optic & Switches and they have all the features you just dream about in their products and they are always preceding the market.
I think that Linux-based router with a so many features, a high performance and so scalable switch router is a innovation to our ISPs community. So I think it is a good idea to keep eyes and to say thanks to Nbase-Xyplex for given us the ability to role our world with an Open router.
I know a Cisco Pix (high-end firewall) uses a P2-233. Also, it uses 32 or 64 MB of RAM and uses flashram cards for storage. The OS is probably living in a flashram too.
I wonder how much non-pc hardware is in a Pix. On the other hand, it can take a maximum of 4 interfaces with a 155 mbit ATM interface being the fastest it can handle. A properly configured Linux box could do the same job.
I haven't seen the GUI tool for configurating the Pix, but the text-interface (via telnet) sux and is more complex than ipchains. Also, the documentation leaves something to be desired. I think I would prefer a Linux box with some reliable hardware.
The Pix does have fail-over capabilities. Something similar can probably done under Linux, but right now I haven't a clue. Anyone any ideas?
Mathijs
Which explains why FreeBeasties only used to quote loopback numbers to compare to the new Linux stack. "Ooh! FreeBSD is faster over loopback than Linux over the wire. Film at 11." -- Linus T.
They're both good, and my P100 with an EEPro 100 card has no problems saturating a 100BT line.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
I've never personally ran into a situation where network performance from linux has suffered, and I use boxes which push TBs/mo in web traffic, millions of hits a day with CGI and no complaints (the boxes themselves usually don't even bust a load average of 1, unless some major disk access is slowing things down). I'd expect that people who're selling routers with linux in the OS wouldn't get very far if there were bottlenecks as bad as some people claim.
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
Zero copy transmits are possible with certain NICs and drivers.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
That's only half the programmers out there. Of course, such a survey is open to interpretation. Did they ask, "Would you like to work for free?" or did they ask, "Would you want your employer to still pay you while you make your source code available for free?".
--
Timur Tabi
Remove "nospam_" from email address
That wasn't FUD. He said "both are good" (after quoting a sarcastic Linus comment, granted).
As for the comparison, I share his experience. One of my boxes is an ancient 90 Mhz Pentium running Linux 2.0.x, and it has no problems at all saturating my 100mbps ethernet. E.g. I use it to burn CD's from a master over the net at 4x, which I believe is pushing the limits.
I've kept the network and that box otherwise fairly quiescent while doing so, figuring there's no point in asking for coasters, but still, it's handling the net, the scsi device, and the CD burner software all at once.
I personally have no idea if FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD are better or worse in these regards, and it doesn't matter to me (except for being interested in knowing when to recommend one thing or another for various purposes). If Linux didn't exist, I'd be using BSD; I have a personal interest in it.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
I've been using, installing, and recommending Xyplex equipment for years. It is without exception well-designed, intuitive, and based only on open standards. They're a good company with good products - it's a shame that they have to live in Cisco's shadow. I'm excited about this new product and hope to get a chance to tinker with one soon. There are just so many possibilities this opens up...
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Nice FUD moron. If you're jealous of FreeBSD, don't whine about it.
Who gives a damn about DECnet? Most people don't. Show me a major internetwork routing DECnet over itself and then you'll have a reason to yack about nonsense like that.
"Amazing what you can cram into 1.44MB"
Not _100%_ sure about the LRP, but most mini-distros I have played with actually cram it all into ~1.7MB on the floppy that's been formatted for a very high density.
"UNIX" is never having to say you're sorry.
I've always been perplexed by people saying "xxx distribution is ok to start with, but no one else should bother with it." (Usually directed at RedHat.)
Let me freely admit that my main Linux machine was originally a RedHat box. Why? I was new to installing linux, for starters. But I also wanted something I could loan to interested friends and relatives that they might be able to install on their own.
I have never bought another distribution. I may pick up Debian or Slack some time in the future, just to compare. But here's my point: My box is Redhat originally, but I feel I have become an intelligent user (compiling the kernel and other software, learning how to manually setup services, boot configurations, etc.). Why would I now go out and buy any other distribution as a "graduation" from RedHat? My machine is my customized version, I have already gone beyond any distribution in terms of what works for me.
(I can see for specialized uses like LRP it is quite a good idea to use another distribution.)
+LO
I have been running a linux router ever cince the net package has been out for Linux!!!!!!
THWAP! THWAP THWAP!!
ok people, getting all wet over something that is just a jumble of hardware with a great OS gluing it together isnt something good, it's olllllld news and just a marketing hype.
It's cool that linux is in the mainstream, it sucks as this company get's credit for what most of us have been doing in our sleep for years.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
a router requires stability and near perfect up-time... something NT hasn't been able to do, cant do currently, and is not expected to be able to do for years to come.
if you have mission critical, you dont use NT.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Great, that means I paid twice for all this NT that eats up all my time. Uhhh...
-- ultra1
-- ultra1
I wish :)
NaTaS
Natas of
-=Pedophagia=-
http://www.mp3.com/pedophagia
Also Admin of
http://loki.linuxgames.com
being employed by a xyplex-nbase reseller, i read
the article with mixed emotions. yes, it's nice to
see people using linux and oss to build these kinds of products, but you must consider *who* is
building the products. having worked with the
xyplex gear before the mrv buyout and subsequent
merge of the xyplex and nbase product lines, i have a place in my heart for the xyplex chassis solutions (network 9000's). yes, they're slow and
limited, but i sleep well at night knowing that we have 100 or so of the 15-slot chassis out there at
customer sites. historically, the xyplex products have been rock-solid. but, with the merger of the two companies, the new products leave little to be excited about. anything that comes from nbase is inherently flawed, from my experience. these people can't seem to make a product that can gracefully deal with spanning tree. how can they be expected to create something that's competitive with today's gigabit switch-router manufacturers. unfortunately, most all of the new xyplex-nbase product line is developed by nbase engineers. so, being the devil's advocate that i am, i'll just have to wait and be amazed if they actually make a worthwhile product.
..ok, now i'll step down from the soapbox.....
Smokes. How much is this sucker? Oh yeah, if I have to ask, that means I can't afford it.
I dunno about the others, but on my OpenBSD box, also a P90, ftping a file from it cause X to simply STOP until the file is done. A simple ping flood will cause the mouse cursor to jerk around and make it hard to move windows around. Maybe some BSD advocate will tell me what I'm doing wrong, but this is not the searing network performance that I was told to expect from the BSDs.
I expect that this would be a target market for the embedded version of NT that MS is working to bring out.
We will see what this really is, but it is already clear that this is not the equivalent of a 486 with a couple of ethernet cards running IP forwarding code.
Dig it?
How about a couple orders of magnitude performance difference with the LRP as the looser.
Don't get me wrong, LRP is absolutely great!
It meets the needs of millions of people, businesses and organizations who need a reasonably flexible packet handling device running at T1 to ethernet speeds but there are plenty of applications for purpose-built hardware solutions.
A reasonably priced switching fabric under the control of open source code which and have modules added to it could be very cool.
Existing Linux based routers are great for the low end, but they can only scale to a certain point because the CPU is involved in all packet forwarding.
In something like this, I/O porcessors, or some specialized ASICs do the scut work of moving data around making low level routing decisions. The OS and CPU only deal with managing the switching fabric. They generally only get involved when things change, such as when a packet comes in for a new destination, or when a route to a destination changes, etc.
Having this management layer available for manipuation could enable linux developers to bring out a new class or network applications.
For example, if this hardware is cheap enough and presents clear interfaces, it should be relatively easy to implement a high performance URL aware HTTP load balancer which could eclipse the performance of any sort of software/general-purpose hardware solution by multiple orders of magnitude.
I was going to say that this would be pretty expensive, but given that this router lists at $300,000, the I2O route could be quite practical.
The I/O processor would forward packets based on a local flow cache. Packets not matching the flow cache would generate an event which would be handled by a module running on the linux OS.
Incoming HTTP requests could be forwarded to a linux module which would spoof the handshake to get URL information. It would then open a connection to the apppropriate web server, populate the flow tables with the appropriate entries and then hand the flow back to the IOPs. The IOPs would forward packets and rewrite headers as needed.
the short answer is no. I don't think that linux would like trying to manage the cbus, pos cards, vip-2s, route switch processors, etc.
Maybe we can use it to convince Cisco to hand out the source code for their 12.X IOS. That is some code I would like to get my hands on.
... exciting, but not ready for primetime.
Unfortunately, the product doesn't seem to be up to snuff yet. No talk of OC-48 Packet over Sonet, or even OC-12 POS, no talk of GigE, no mention of BGP??? Looks like one to keep your eyes on and watch how it develops
You were led to believe correctly. The deeper question that yours leads to is whether or not any operating system's IP stack is up to speed with a custom-designed solution. Juniper, I know, is making some gigabit-class routers based on the BSD kernel, but nobody has been able to take away Cisco's IOS market share yet ... is it worth our time to try to route with OS-based systems? Is a hacked version of routed or gated robust enough to pass 20 or 30 gig across a switching and routing backplane? More power to them if they can, but i have doubts.
pardon me replying so much, but I work on Ciscos all day and am interested in any other players in the market. A couple of the issues I see are:
-- express/optimum switching. Here, we are using the first packet headed toward a destination over a certain port to evaluate through the router's access lists, and then allowing the remaining packets toward that destination over that port to flow through the switching hardware without being evaluated by the processor? Is a BSD or Linux-based gated able to handle the logical concept of flows to optimize access lists and route processing?
-- nifty features: yes, they're standards based, but does the gated gsr support soft inbound and outbound soft reconfigs on bgp? What about nifty things like HDLC, which beats the hell out of PPP. ISL trunking between your switches and routers? Fast Etherchannel? Fast drops on access lists, which saves immense amounts of processor time when you are writing a smurf filter. Easy disabling of directed-broadcast, while we're talking smurfs. Rate limits on circuits?
What I'm saying here is that a BSD or Linux based router is going to have to sell itself to a lot of people who maintain internet backbones for a living. It is going to have to have a feature set that meets or exceeds our current vendor's. While I can see the applicibility of a BSD or Linux based router on the low end, I have yet to see an entry that I would trust a nationwide backbone to.
A little more than processing OSPF maps is taken care of in software:
-Processing of access lists
-Managing switching path logical connections
-Maintaining all processing for your Interior Gateway protocol(s) of choice
-Maintaining all BGP route maps, route tables from upstream neighbors, route reflection client or server processes, metric processing, etc.
-Maintaining the master route table, where BGP and IGP routes are held and routing decisions are made
-Any and all network management
-Any and all console diagnostics, line card monitoring, environment monitoring, power monitoring, etc.
-Handles any high-level encapsulation, especially tunnels and encapsulation of Appletalk, DECnet, IPX, X.25, etc.
That strikes me as a little more than a configuration front end.
I believe the Linux Router Project ( http://www.linuxrouter.org/) may be what folks are looking for here.... the idea is a mini-Debian distro-on-a-floppy. 'Tis pretty slick, what little I've played with it. Amazing what you can cram into 1.44MB. (Reminds me of the old days of the 255-byte BASIC games :) :)
der rezident old fsck...
I have been led to believe that BSD was far superior to Linux when it came to networking performance. Why base it on Linux when BSD is still much faster?
Actually, the OS on a gigabit switching router (GSR) doesn't really do much. No OS is going to actually keep up with 40Gbit/sec on modern processors, the real work is done by the hardware with the OS providing GUI functions and poking the appropriate hardware bits as needed. I'd guess that using Linux is going to do them more good from a marketing standpoint (riding on the current wave of hype) then from a technical one.
A similar product, the Juniper Networks M40 , uses a modified version of the FreeBSD kernel.
-- Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE.
Hell 'we' get 400 Gbps on a single fibre.
But then we're the reason we say *nix!
Drool
Here's a question for anyone who's worked with both Linux and IOS:
Would it be possible to compile Linux to run on the Cisco equipment? IOS supports downloading a new "Flash ROM" for IOS updates, so I'm guessing that Linux could run on a Cisco router/switch/hub for a lot less than the several-thousand-dollar IOS software?????
Please enlighten me...
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
Cisco licensed QNX last May, so I don't think they're going to use Linux or go Open Source. Check out QNX's press release.
You may also want to check out another mini-dist based on Debian that is aimed at a firewall/routing box booting from one floppy.
Linux can beat BSD much of the time. See the scoreboard, where Linux toasts both SunOS 5 (SysV-based Solaris 2) and SunOS 4 (BSD-based Solaris 1) on Sun's own hardware.
I'm sure the OS is just there to config the hardware and perform low-speed tasks as needed. The real work is done on special-purpose chips. Just think about the memory bandwidth your CPU would need to handle all that.
Yeah, that Linus guy must be a dumb newbie.
Only a dumb newbie would be seduced by such
a simple no-hassle distribution like Red Hat.
Linus probably has Linux just to be cool, and
really only uses Windows 95. Yeah, Red Hat users
like Linus might even have trouble with AOL.
>``The OSR8000 has addressed the market demand for a flexible, high
>performance enterprise solution that increases network bandwidth on demand
>and preserves mission critical application requirements for enterprise and
>service provider networks,'' said Noam Lotan, president and CEO of MRV
>Communications.
>
Do you think he actually *said* that? Wow. It seems like it would take a commitee to say something like that.
This is the same company that stole graphics from my employer's web site for there AcceleRouter product. Granted, my employer wanted to look into switching to Linux from another embedded OS, unfortunately Linux is just too resource intensive for our box. As far as stacks go, BSD and Linux stacks have their strengths. One thing I would like to see in the Linux TCP/IP stack is the ability to perform zero-copy transmits and support hardware TCP/UDP checksum calculation. What also would be useful would be the ability to blast data out of the disk cache without copying. Unfortunately it will take some work to adjust Linux's stack architecture and all of the network drivers.
Linux has a nice TCP/IP stack, but it's not as feature-rich as BSDs. I.E. no T/TCP or RSVP (last I checked).
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
What makes you think that Cisco IOS has an advantage in performance over Linux? IOS can run on a single processor, Linux can run on multiple processors.
I'm not much of OS expert though...Any gurus out there:-?
There is a neat project going on named Linux Router Project. It was described in Linux journal I think March issue. The cool thing is that the kernel can fit on a 1.44M floppy. Definitely NT can't do that.
Well one of the obvious is that LRP is free, Open Source and the other is for sale and one can't get the source. Another is that LRP is not aimed at businesses, more at hackers. (yes hackers as I and other ./ers define it, not the way media does).
From: Bob von Ende
NBASE-XYPLEX
Bobv@nbase.com
In answer to many questions and comments I offer you some points of clarification concerning our New High End Linux Router.
Architecture - Component based
Open Interface
Flexible, high performance switch fabric
Back-end Linux engine
Scalable Architecture
All components are open; each component can be updated, replaced, or changed independently.
Any of the components are open by themselves.
Any of the components can be upgraded independently
User programmable ASIC's are open and extensible
Open Interface
Open, flexible & extensible interface
Open application programmer interface provides for direct user enhancements and upgrades.
A non-proprietary Operating system which eliminates the single vendor dependence and encourages in house development capabilities.
Users can add their own features or obtain additional features from the developer community.
New features will become available quickly and be certified and supplied by the vendors faster than other competing router OS's.
The Switching Fabric
An Active backplane with (Qos)
Scalable 40 Gbps to 160 Gbps cell based switching fabric providing 26 million pps throughput.
Multiple processors with 4 Intel processors upgradable to 16 processors
Native multicast support
Frame & Cell Switching
Classification upon any frame/cell pattern
The Back-end Linux Engine
Functionality: routing protocols & any other network applications
Per user customization
Unlimited & fast adding/updating features and applications
Easy hardware expansion & modification
Conclusion
Non-proprietary router OS
Seamless Integration of custom applications
Flexible, scalable, high performance solution
Full security functionality
Features and capabilities added faster than competing products
Support for most routing protocols
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