So far we have covered what VPP is, and why its interesting to us.

Part of the story with any new service/implementation always centres around testing. How do you prove, definitively, that something does what it says on the tin. RFC2544 outlines a series of testing strategies and for the purpose of this work we try to keep it simple.

I have deployed a TRex traffic generator on Debian 11 (OFED 5.7-1 doesn’t build on deb12) with Mellanox 2x100G ConnectX5 CDAT cards with Trex v3.04. There are really nice instructions here for that. Happily ignore the CentOS7 religious texts - Debian is fine. Death to DeadRat.

In the previous post we were talking about what VPP was. Here we explore a little why it matters.

What’s the point anyways?

It’s a fair question. Surely its not logical to invest so much time and effort into something that has been described numerous times as “janky”. One of my engineers even now says, “I understand why you want to do it, but I don’t agree that this is the right solution”. She’s right too btw.

Linux Routing is becoming a thing with me. I cant decide if the motivation is the extreme cost of dedicated hardware, or the knowledge that with a little effort you can make a free/cheap thing into a giant killer. David and Goliath is a fun story I guess.

VPP has been on my radar now for a few years. I have tried and failed a few times to get it into production typically on the internet edge of a datacentre in place of something expensive like a Cisco ASR or a Juniper MX.

Last year I wrote extensively about my experience with deploying VyOS to support my new uber fast internet connection.

I learned a lot in the process, and for this past year it has mostly worked fine. I am one of those people that can’t leave things alone however, and I was always tinkering with the setup. The VyOS box itself was happily communicating at 10G, but I would find the internal LAN would get choked up a lot and rarely hit 1G even with extreme threading (say 50-60 conns). I got grumpy about this for no reason and started to tinker. TL:DR - This was a mistake…

Weird. In my first hugo post just two days ago I speculated it would take me weeks to get this content off blogger and into hugo.

It took me three evenings.

All the DNS has been switched and we are now fully on hugo with a gitops workflow, previews on a branch push and I was even able to retain the old URL paths as an alias, so anyone googling my stupid opinions can still read them on the new or the old path. Noice.