Fri, 14 Sep 2007
Networking Preview
Our network here at Faculty of Informatics is connected to the outside world by a not-so-small Linux-based router (10 subnets mapped using 802.1q to three gigabit and one 100 Mbit physical interfaces of the router). From time to time I wonder what will we do should this router reach its packet forwarding load limit. Today I have found some hints on how will the networking gear of the future look like:
See DaveM's presentation about the Sun Neptune dual-port 10GbE network card. Fortunately, the future is not in TCP offload engines (useless for a router), but in being successful in exploiting parallelism. I.e. how to use the single device from multiple CPUs or cores, how to distribute IRQs, etc. I hope his work ends up in the mainstream kernel soon. The only remaining problem is to get some 10GbE switches to upgrade our backbone...