I think it would be interesting to see some diversification from the "server-as-a-router" market's current offerings, which are mostly just generic computers with multiple network interfaces and rackmount cases. Soekris is in an interesting position to be able to build application specific hardware, since the board is mostly custom. I think it would be cool if we had packet processing and switching done in hardware, and integrated into the OS' routing and bridging tables, so that packet switching and some routing decisions could be made in purpose specific hardware rather than on the general use CPU.
I think the specs of the 6501 are sufficient for most network appliance applications, but what is missing is the ability to significantly scale up traffic. Doing that with a general purpose CPU seems expensive and would be taxing on the rest of the operating system. It seems a few companies have dabbled with creating PCIe ethernet switches that can switch packets on-card, but nothing that looks like it's meant to be controlled by or integrated well with the operating system. -Dan On Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 1:44 PM Christopher Sean Hilton <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 10:27:23PM +0200, Vadim Troshchinskiy wrote: > > That makes sense, but it's still a pity not to have a higher spec > > machine to move to, even if it's not that particular model. > > > > Though on the other hand it makes a fair amount of sense: I've been > > searching for alternatives and the latest Atom is about 3 years old! It > > seems like this market doesn't see a lot of activity, unfortunately. > > Having a higher spec machine to move to depends on a lot of things but > it's not worth speculating on that in this list. > > One thing that's always surprised me is that Soekris has not built a > machine with socketed RAM. I'm sure that there's a good reason for it > but since my load tends to be more memory than CPU footprint, non > socketed RAM makes Soekris stuff less desirable. > > -- > Chris > > __o "All I was trying to do was get home from work." > _`\<,_ -Rosa Parks > ___(*)/_(*)____.___o____..___..o...________ooO..._____________________ > Christopher Sean Hilton [chris/at/vindaloo/dot/com] > _______________________________________________ > Soekris-tech mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech >
_______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
