Current best version for router use

[Paul Thornton]

Hi list,

A bit of advice please, folks.

We currently use 6.2-release + Quagga as a router on a number of boxes.  
These are stable but we have seen some CPU issues recently and clearly 
the code is all getting old now, and so I'm starting to look at updating 
them.

Specifically, the hardware consists of a single dual-core Xeon at 2GHz 
with 2G RAM, containing 10x em interfaces (2x quad PCI-X cards, plus 2 
onboard) .  IRQ sharing is a bit of an issue and only 8 of those 1G 
ports can be used without re-using an interrupt.
They run with polling enabled, with kern.polling.user_frac = 22
These routers run Quagga 0.99.7 doing v4 and v6 OSPF/BGP.
We do use a number of vlans and a couple of gif tunnels.
Total throughput varies quite a lot - from 50M to about 200M - but 
usually isn't high.

There seem to be a lot of issues that have appeared around 8.0 and the 
em code, and although patches have quickly appeared, I know that a lot 
of the forwarding and routing code in 8 is new  - so whilst I would 
normally have just tested this with 8 and not considered anything else, 
I am thinking that maybe sticking with 7 is a better plan.

I'd appreciate any input from anyone who is using 8.0 in a similar 
environment, any advice and suggestions would be gratefully received.

Thanks,

Paul.