Quagga as border router

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Thu, Sep 20, 2007 at 07:49:11AM -0400, Yuri Lukin wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Sep 2007 00:24:09 -0700, Alfred Perlstein wrote
> > 
> > Juniper is based on FreeBSD. ;-)
> 
> On old code from the 4.x days I think, right?

Technically no, they've been updating large portions of the FreeBSD code 
over time. I believe the current build is a late 5.x and a 6.x is due for 
public release soon in JUNOS 8.5.

But at any rate, it really doesn't matter, because the FreeBSD part has 
absolutely bubkiss to do with routing the packets. Juniper simply took 
FreeBSD as an existing mature and stable OS, heavily modified it for their 
purposes, and slapped it onto an off-the-shelf PC for use as a control 
plane (running routing protocols, cli, chassis management, etc). The 
routes are calculated and pushed out to the forwarding hardware via 
Ethernet, and the packets never touch the FreeBSD based part unless they 
are destined for it locally (as though it was an ordinary host).

Honestly, FreeBSD routing code is pretty poor as far as a modern router 
goes. If you throw enough CPU at it you can brute force your way through 
plenty of things, but in the context of modern commercial routers it 
doesn't even play in the same league (even for a software-only router).

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)