Software router state of the art

[trelane at trelane.net (Andrew D Kirch)]

Zed Usser wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> There's been some discussion on the list regarding software routers lately and this piqued my interest. Does anybody have any recent performance and capability statistics (eg. forwarding rates with full BGP tables and N ethernet interfaces) or any pointer to what the current state of art in software routers is?
>
> - Zed
I'd like to be wrong, but there's no way that any PC/Commodity routing 
system is going to work (in any environment other than Ethernet).  For 
the small ISP starting out (you know, the ones selling T1's/xDSL), there 
are no Channelized T3/OC3 cards available for a PeeCee, which means you 
still need to buy something from Cisco or Juniper.  And the major 
carriers are already using Cisco/Juniper, because even at the price they 
charge they aren't unreasonable because they support their product.  I 
don't care how many packets per second, or simultaneous route flows you 
can do if I can't plug anything besides Ethernet into it.  If you can 
show me the hardware, great I'll take a look at it, otherwise these 
simply don't matter all that much.

Andrew