Comment by Youden
3 days ago
I have 25Gbps from Init7 at home. My "router" is a Minisforum MS-01 with a second-hand Mellanox ConnectX-5, running VyOS.
My main home server is a Supermicro SYS-510D-4C-FN6P. It has dual 25Gbps ports onboard but also an Intel E810-XXVDA4T with another 4x25Gbps ports.
Both of them are perfectly capable of saturating their ports using stock forwarding on Linux, no DPDK, VPP, anything, without breaking a sweat. Both of them were substantially cheaper than the machine in the article.
Is there something I'm missing? Why does this workstation need a ~$1000 motherboard and a ~$1000 Xeon CPU? Those two components alone cost more than either of my computers and seem like severe overkill.
My understanding is that the setup needs to allow them to work on packet routing at those speeds, not just send/receive, to simulate SCION.
Ah, so they need to hold giant routing tables in memory and do lookups in them or something like that?
Does not look like it [1]. It appears to be a protocol that enumerates your exact path, interface by interface, on every data packet. So you can just blindly forward to the next hop written in the packet itself.
By my guess, a competent and efficient implementation should be able to run the routing logic at ~30-100 million packets per second per core. That would be ~300-1,000 Gb/s per core, so you would bottleneck on your memory bandwidth if you have even a single copy.
[1] https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-dekater-scion-dataplan...
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> Is there something I'm missing? Why does this workstation need a ~$1000 motherboard and a ~$1000 Xeon CPU? Those two components alone cost more than either of my computers and seem like severe overkill.
Yes, as stated in the article, it probably could have been cheaper. But this setup is supposed to:
1. Run simulations and benchmarks of/on entire SCION topologies with multiple ASes.
2. Potentially grow beyond 25 Gbit/s into the 200 Gbit/s ranges (and more?).
3. Be available to me ASAP (can't wait months for it to arrive from China).
4. Potentially be used for CI/CD performance regression testing in the future.
The budget allowed a bit of headroom for the future.
SCION is much slower than normal IP.
Huh?
"SCION OSS border router performance reached a ceiling of around 400k-500k packets per second, which is roughly equivalent to 5-6 Gbit/s at a 1500-byte MTU." vs. 1.4 M PPS for IP (on an older CPU) https://toonk.io/linux-kernel-and-measuring-network-throughp...
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Your MS-01 routes line-rate 25Gbps in software with VyOS w/o kernel bypass? That's very surprising to me. At what packet sizes?