I am extremly sorry, if this mail is not relvant to this group. But those who can help regarding IXP2400 network processor, please go through it. I am K.AnanthaKiran doing M.Tech C.S.E in Indian Institute of Technology,KANPUR INDIA. We are working on project, in which we need to splitt the online traffic onto different streams based on IP,port feilds in the packet. Here rate of traffic we want to work with is Gbps level. In simple, one interface will keeps on listening all the pkts in promiscous mode , and those listened pkts has to be redirected through one of several interfaces based on the IP,Port feilds in the Pkt. This task has to be accomplished in a Gbps traffic setup. Recently we came to know that, Intel IXP2400 network processor can be the best choice for the problems of this sort. I am completely new to this h/w. Can anybody, please calrify my small doubts regarding the IXP2400. I have gone through the documents related to IXP2400 and some documents on general network processors. What i got understand is that, IXP2400 will connect to normal PC, through PCI-bus of that PC. And all Ethernet-Interfaces are connected to IXP2400 through some bus. We will develop programs for IXP2400, in that normal PC only by using IXP2400 s/w development tools like Command line interface, Microcode C compiler and libraries. The binaries of our programs are placed in the IXP2400 SRAMs using some instructions, which make it execute. From now onwards, whatever packet that comes to Ethernet-Interface, will be intercepted by IXP2400 and redirected through some other interface accordingly based on my program. DOUBTS: ======== I am not sure how far i understood correctly,but thats what i was able to understand. Please clarify me, about how IXP2400 gets connected to a Host. What sort of host is needed.Does the normal PC(or host) enough for that or we need to have a special Host which is specially made for IXP2400. Please give me what are all h/w components (like IXP2400 , XScaleProcessor, IXA ) and s/w componets (C compiler for micro code,Command line interface and libraries) i need to have to solve my problem. Because i dont know correctly about the use of above mentioned h/w(XScale processor, IXA). Please ,it would be a great help for me , even if u can guide me atleast in this small doubts. Waiting for ur valuable replies, K.AnanthaKiran - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-admin" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html