Hi Diana That Mikrotik router board is based on originally a tilera chip the chip owner which was sold to ez chip which then sold to mellanox. Im not sure what mellanox are doing with the tech The chip was a tile architecture meaning adding additional cores was easy (ier) for the manufacturer
>From my experience of using hardware is that it is massively parallelising individual 1 ghz cores.. Early experience was poor enough... aparently many vendors who tfied this architecture had pains with the quality of the reference linux kernel 3.3x i believe... Stability was painful... to be fair it would be difficult for any vendor trying to run code designed for faster individual cores and then trying to run on many slower cores... Packet ordering and through put was painful particularly with encapsulating /dencapsulating traffic loads The architecture has some nice features such as interrupt load balancing in hardware (similar to those found on server chipsets...) nics built directly ito the chip... Mikrotik have done an lot of work on reworking their os to use the architecture better... iron out kinks in the linux kernel on that architecture... rewritten alot of their code to handle out of order packets better and to make their code make use of more cores. Alot of their work is paying off for certain loads but you are limited in what features you can use on the router in "fast path" to get the big packet rate numbers ... The build quality of the mikrotik ccrs make them more attractive for development on than some of their low budget offerings (eg rb2011) I have 1 x ccr2016 tilera 12 port 16 core router spare if there is an interested dev who wants to seriously look at the architecture... but with uncertainty of what mellanox will do with the chip it may be a waste of time... Also im not sure how open the architecture and if they have some bsd licensed code / reference implentation to get development started on it I hope this helps Tom Smyth On Mon 16 Apr 2018, 19:42 Diana Eichert, <deich...@wrench.com> wrote: > I subscribe to the OpenBSD arm list but was wondering what the > appropriate mon-misc list would be for mips based h/w, ex: > Cavium Octeon. > > Sometimes I don't want to pollute misc@ with h/w specific > questions. > > thanks > diana > > PS Anyone seen this hardware, > https://mikrotik.com/product/CCR1036-12G-4S-EM ? > >