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Comment by Traubenfuchs | Hacker News Reader

What kept this from being available til now? Seems like Cisco had it for ages.

> With experimental technologies, Linux has been shown to make some gains in artificial benchmarks, such as dropping all received packets

Is this a joke? A jab?

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VPP has been publicly available since 2017 or before. it’s incredibly fast and feature-full

dropping a packet after processing overhead and/or explicit classification work is a useful benchmark yes

Dropping packets efficiently is really important for handling DDoS. AFAIK that was the original motivation for Cloudflare to adopt XDP.

Oh man, on first reading I definitely thought it was saying "with experimental technologies, Linux can drop all traffic", which would have been a hilarious dig... but I think "drop all incoming packets" is a useful benchmark for evaluating overhead, like doing conntrack for every packet that hits then immediately discarding it.

Yeah that was my interpretation as well. Like the fastest Java Garbage Collector, the one that actually doesn't collect any garbage and lets it pile up til the JVM crashes.

>What kept this from being available til now? Seems like Cisco had it for ages.

Cisco is the one who wrote it and open sourced it. Netgate is just putting a wrapper around other people's (Cisco's) code.

>Is this a joke? A jab?

No, dropping packets is step 1 to proving you can get past some of the current CPU bottlenecks. Actually doing something useful is obviously significantly more work, but no point bothering with that work if the CPU is still the bottleneck.

> Netgate is just putting a wrapper around other people's (Cisco's) code.

Cisco open sourced VPP in 2016 and we've been busy working on it ever since.

https://www.stackalytics.io/unaffiliated?module=github.com/f...

This is the same project that was developed at Cisco originally

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