Hello. I'd like to know LinuxMIPS community opinion on network hardware accelerators. I'm not talking about VPN accelerators, there is plenty of material on the subject on the net and the benefits are quite clear, as well as potential problems. There is a claim that in order to do wire-speed, i.e. 100Mbps, router using not high-end embedded processor, say MIPS 4K or 24K, one has to use hardware accelerators for firewall, NAT, bridging and other standard networking features of the residential gateway. I know that the idea of HW network accelerators is not very welcome in Linux community and the problems in functionality that it can cause. But the question still remains - whether 100Mbps firewall, NAT, etc can run on moderately priced embedded processor without HW acceleration. Opinions ? I'm going to get my hands on a reference design board in order to do some benchmarking, but maybe somebody saw these kinds of benchmarks on the net ? There are quite a few processors we are looking at and it would be problematic to benchmark them all. Thanks.
