Can someone point me to an Open Source OS which can host a BGP-capable router?
Thanks.
Best Regards,
Simon
a message of 15 lines which said:
Can someone point me to an Open Source OS which can host a BGP-capable router?
You mean free software (Open Source is a buzzword for suits)? Any free
Unix will work. I use Zebra <URL:http://www.zebra.org/> on Debian
<http://www.debian.org/> machines running the Linux kernel but, from
reading the Zebra list, it seems most Zebraists use FreeBSD.
I have implemented a number of network throughout the years (shut up Neil
starting with Gated on NetBSD then OpenBSD and then switched gated to
zebra.
Current personal 'state of the art' is OpenBSD 3.0 with zebra 0.92a -
waiting for the new stuff in the zebra CVS tree to hit a new release.
Peter
Any of the BSD derivatives will work fine. My personal preference being
FreeBSD. Remember though, without significat hardware changes, the home
x86/BSD/zebra solution is not going to work in a core environment - there are
backplane throughput issues stopping you there. This should be considered as
box for either the lab or the small lan/wan environment.
Yours,
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin@mfn.org
Does anybody have any rough figures for what kind of load (both
bytes/s total throughput and packets/s) a more or less vanilla x86
running a free OS can handle today? The last time I looked at this --
several years ago -- I seemed to top out at somewhere close to 200
Mb/s total throughput; I figured I could safely count on 100 Mb/s.
That is consistent with a 32-bit PCI bus running at 33 MHz: raw
capacity is 1 Gb/s, but each bit takes two trips over the bus, so
that's 500 Mb/s, but then there's substantial bus overhead
(contention, burst setup overhead, etc.).
I didn't look at packet count limits, as they didn't seem to be
a problem for me in my actual traffic mix; but I expect that with
enough small packets, packet count would become the limiting factor.
That was in the days when a Pentium 133 was a mid-range PC. I would
expect faster memories, bigger caches, but (most of all) a 64-bit
PCI bus running at 66 MHz to make a big difference.
Hypothetically, a box that could handle, say, 750 Mb/s is not suitable
for "core" use, but it can certainly handle more than "a couple of
T1s."
Jim Shankland
* nanog@shankland.org (Jim Shankland) [Thu 06 Dec 2001, 17:28 CET]:
Does anybody have any rough figures for what kind of load (both
bytes/s total throughput and packets/s) a more or less vanilla x86
running a free OS can handle today? The last time I looked at this --
From the FreeBSD commit logs of src/sys/i386/conf/NOTES (rev 1.961):
Add device driver support for the Broadcom BCM570x family of gigabit
ethernet controllers. This adds support for the 3Com 3c996-T, the
SysKonnect SK-9D21 and SK-9D41, and the built-in gigE NICs on
Dell PowerEdge 2550 servers. The latter configuration hauls ass:
preliminary measurements show TCP speeds of over 900Mbps using
only normal size frames.TCP/IP checksum offload, jumbo frames and VLAN tag insertion/stripping
are supported, as well as interrupt moderation.Still need to fix autonegotiation support for 1000baseSX NICs, but
beyond that, driver is pretty solid.
Hypothetically, a box that could handle, say, 750 Mb/s is not suitable
for "core" use, but it can certainly handle more than "a couple of
T1s."
Depends on what your core looks like. Note that the above were TCP
speeds, not packet forwarding speeds; I assume counts for the latter
would be slightly higher.
To save you some clicking, a PowerEdge 2550 is a 2U chassis with one of
those adapters on-board connected to a 64-bit 66 MHz PCI bus, three free
64-bit 33 MHz PCI slots, dual Pentium III CPUs and oodles of ECC 133 MHz
SDRAM with memory interleaving support.
Oh, and please note that I am staying very far away from a discussion
of PC vs. Cisco equipment quality and software reliability. 
Regards,
-- Niels.
There is also the Multi Threaded Routing Toolkit from Merit, which has a
Cisco-a-like configuration.
Please See:
Regards,
James
Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 08:32:19 -0800
From: Jim Shankland <nanog@shankland.org>
Does anybody have any rough figures for what kind of load (both
bytes/s total throughput and packets/s) a more or less vanilla x86
running a free OS can handle today? The last time I looked at this --
several years ago -- I seemed to top out at somewhere close to 200
Mb/s total throughput; I figured I could safely count on 100 Mb/s.
That is consistent with a 32-bit PCI bus running at 33 MHz: raw
capacity is 1 Gb/s, but each bit takes two trips over the bus, so
that's 500 Mb/s, but then there's substantial bus overhead
(contention, burst setup overhead, etc.).
Hardly vanilla x86, but in between PCs and <insert favorite
router mfg here> one has CompactPCI and cPSB. A quick Google
search will give more info.
Eddy