I know this question has been asked many times, but there has been no official explanation. Is FastPath/FastTrack a pure software acceleration solution? Does it use the SOC’s built-in hardware acceleration module? In particular, does the RB5009 machine have hardware NAT acceleration capability? I hope to get an official reply, thanks !
Fastpath/fasttrack is in principle software feature. Some devices are capable of offloading, have a look at L3HW offloading, it has a section about which devices can offload what.
There are devices which are supposedly to offer similar functionality but it’s not (yet) implemented in ROS. This may happen in future or not (so it’s not sensible to base your purchase today on expectation that it will happen in future).
So for RB5009 it is a pure software NAT router. I mean it doing NAT in Linux Kernel without using hardware accelerator in the soc,right?
Yes. So far.
Looks like the 88E6393X switch chip used in the 5009 can do basic L3 hardware routing, but I cannot find doco on chip NAT functions.
https://www.marvell.com/content/dam/marvell/en/public-collateral/switching/marvell-switching-link-street-88e6393x-product-brief.pdf
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Hence the second paragraph in my post #2 above. In ROS nothing can be taken for granted until it’s actually implemented. For example, allegedly MT7621A (SoC, used in Hex RB750Gr3) can do some L3 in hardware, there are reports that some other vendors use same SoC in their devices and the performance is much higher than in MT devices … but that’s not supported in ROS. So I wouldn’t hold my breathe waiting for RB5009 to get L3HW support.