In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. [LWN.net]

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

Posted Jan 26, 2011 21:40 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806)
In reply to: In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. by ebiederm
Parent article: LCA: IP address exhaustion and the end of the open net

Markov generated text seeded with the iptables manpage?

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In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.

Posted Jan 27, 2011 13:51 UTC (Thu) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link]

Must be. It lacks everything, from content, to truth.

Being someone who has actually tried to do 10Gbps routing using Linux, I am well aware of its limitations. You need lots of tuning and the correct hardware to get high packets-per-second rates, and it gets nowhere close to the target 40Mpps. It really is useful only for large packets, or if you need nowhere near line-rate and don't care about DoS attacks with small packets.

One really needs hardware-assisted packet forwarding to do line-speed 10-gigabit routing at all packet sizes. Either that or a routing cluster, at which point TCO goes well above a proper 10Gbit Cisco/Juniper switch-router.

So, the question becomes: are there affordable, non-experimental hardware packet forwarding devices (preferably PCIe) that are compatible with Linux?