Re: TOE brain dump

Jesse Pollard
2003-08-04T13:09:44Z

On Monday 04 August 2003 03:55, Ihar 'Philips' Filipau wrote:
> Werner Almesberger wrote:
> > Ihar 'Philips' Filipau wrote:
> >> Modern NPUs generally do this.
> >
> > Unfortunately, they don't - they run *some* code, but that
> > is rarely a Linux kernel, or a substantial part of it.
>
> Embedded CPU we are using is based MIPS, and has a lot of specialized
> instructions.
> It makes not that much sense to run kernel (especially Linux) on CPU
> which is optimized for handling of network packets. (And has actually
> several co-processors to help in this task).
> How much sense it makes to run general purpose OS (optimized for PCs
> and servers) on devices which can make only couple of functions? (and no
> MMU btw)
> It is a whole idea behind this kind of CPUs - to do a few of
> functions - but to do them good.
>
> If you will start stretching CPUs like this to fit Linux kernel - it
> will generally just increase price. Probably there are some markets
> which can afford this.
>
> Remeber - "Small is beatiful" (c) - and linux kernel far from it.
> Our routing code which handles two GE interfaces (actually not pure
> GE, but up to 2.5GB) fits into 3k. 3k of code - and that's it. not 650kb
> of bzip compressed bloat. And it handles two interfaces, handles fast
> data path from siblign interfaces, handles up to 1E6 routes. 3k of code.
> not 650k of bzip.

And it handles ipfilter?
and LSM security hooks?
how about IPSec?
and IPv6?

I don't think so.