Thanks everyone for your answers, that's very helpful to me :-) On 07/03/2017 19:46, Matthew Walster wrote:
On 7 March 2017 at 05:57, Clément Guivy <clement@guivy.fr <mailto:clement@guivy.fr>>wrote:
Hello, I am considering the setup of BIRD as a router to handle our internet traffic. One information I fail to find is hardware requirements.
Clément,
Let's just clear one thing up straight away -- BIRD is a daemon for routing protocols, not for routing traffic itself. BIRD itself will handle your requirements in terms of the BGP information incredibly well. As I understand it, BIRD only utilises one CPU core, but this is not the bottleneck factor here.
When the FIB has been calculated, it is usually exported to your kernel (we'll assume Linux for now) via Netlink messages. Depending on how efficient your kernel is at building the trie structure, this may actually take more time than processing the BGP Updates!
Once the routes are loaded into the kernel, it is the kernel (usually) that forwards the traffic. This is usually (roughly) proportional to the performance of your processor. You will probably have to make iptables changes to prevent that restricting the performance at high levels.
That said, 1Gbps of IMIX traffic should easily be forwarded by any modern x86-like server out there. Just be aware that it will be more susceptible to small-packet attacks due to the lower packet-per-second throughput compared to routers you may be used to.
Hope that helps!
Matthew Walster