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iDen
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Does CRS125-24G support MPLS?

Wed Oct 23, 2013 3:19 pm

I'm interested:
If RoS is fully functional on CRS125-24G.
Especially if it normally supports MPLS and BGP?
And what is MTU on ports?
 
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normis
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Re: Does CRS125-24G support MPLS?

Wed Oct 23, 2013 3:20 pm

Yes, it does. But if you will use purely as a router, remember that it's performance is not so high (it is a MIPS CPU). You could assign some ports to be a router, and the rest for switching. Yes, it will support BGP and MPLS, just like any RouterOS device.
 
iDen
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Re: Does CRS125-24G support MPLS?

Wed Oct 23, 2013 6:59 pm

Yes, it does. But if you will use purely as a router, remember that it's performance is not so high (it is a MIPS CPU). You could assign some ports to be a router, and the rest for switching. Yes, it will support BGP and MPLS, just like any RouterOS device.
sure no huge configurations for such low-perf device
max 1-2 routing ports and remaining for access.

nothing about MTU on ports ?
 
cheeze
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Re: Does CRS125-24G support MPLS?

Thu Oct 24, 2013 12:44 am

iDen, in all honestly there probably isn't any limitations software wise (excluding license limits of course) on the box. Really from what it seems, the box is just limited by CPU power. However the device is not one that is meant to be a high pps router. It's mainly meant to switch (as it has the ASIC intelligence for that). It however doesn't have the ASIC intelligence for routing. Unfortunately, layer 3 routing ASICs are still.....super inflated in cost as one can make a LOOOOOOT of money off of them. That and they're pretty difficult to make.

So the way to look at this box is a switch with routing capabilities.

As long as you don't overtax the CPU, it'll route all day and not care.

Normis, I do have a question though. The CPU speed modifiable down AND up? or only down? Reason why I ask is cause it seems the processor is up in the 1Ghz range. If I added the extra external cooling then...I guess I'd like to get more throughput out of it. However, Mikrotik of course doesn't HAVE to allow this. I'm just mostly curious. Maybe the SI_ClkIn can be modified within ROS.

That and, would yalls be all that offended if I thermal taped a heatsink to the CPU?
 
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normis
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Re: Does CRS125-24G support MPLS?

Thu Oct 24, 2013 9:16 am

L2MTU is 4064
CPU clock variants are min 500/ default 600/ max 750MHz
 
timberwolf
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Re: Does CRS125-24G support MPLS?

Thu Oct 24, 2013 9:16 am

Unfortunately, layer 3 routing ASICs are still.....super inflated in cost as one can make a LOOOOOOT of money off of them. That and they're pretty difficult to make.
Sorry if I seem harsh, but where the hell do you get your infos from?!
They aren't expensive anymore and also they aren't that difficult to make. We don't live in the 80s..
Also a small company like MikroTik isn't forced to design those ASICs themself.
If you need examples, then maybe look up the BCM56512, licensing costs may be a bit to high for MT but in that case they could use an Cavium Octeon CN5020 and have an SoC with included CPU and packet accelaration in the 2-3Gbps range.
 
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normis
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Re: Does CRS125-24G support MPLS?

Thu Oct 24, 2013 9:33 am

The CRS is basically a switch, with optional routing functionality. If we were to make a product like timberwolf is describing, it would be a different type of device, for a different purpose.
 
timberwolf
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Re: Does CRS125-24G support MPLS?

Thu Oct 24, 2013 9:43 am

Well normis, I really was hoping that the CRS would have some basic L3 routing capacity in hardware. I don't expect MT to come up with a full featured L3 high performance switch with enterprise features.
 
cheeze
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Re: Does CRS125-24G support MPLS?

Fri Oct 25, 2013 1:41 am

L2MTU is 4064
CPU clock variants are min 500/ default 600/ max 750MHz
Coo coo coo, thank you much Normis. A 25% could always help out for CPU starved situations.

Sorry if I seem harsh, but where the hell do you get your infos from?!
They aren't expensive anymore and also they aren't that difficult to make. We don't live in the 80s..
Also a small company like MikroTik isn't forced to design those ASICs themself.
If you need examples, then maybe look up the BCM56512, licensing costs may be a bit to high for MT but in that case they could use an Cavium Octeon CN5020 and have an SoC with included CPU and packet accelaration in the 2-3Gbps range.
I get my info from checking on which devices are layer 3 capable in ASICs vs which devices are layer 3 capable through a general purpose CPU. Look at the price differences between the two and you'll see that ASICs that route are NOT cheap. I will agree that the ASICs themselves aren't anywhere NEAR as expensive as they used to be, but they are still very expensive compared to a general purpose CPU. Mikrotik isn't forced to design the ASICs as they could go to like Fulcrum, or Broadcom, or Marvell. However it'd take a while for them to actually write ROS to support said silicon assuming the licensing costs don't make it prohibitively expensive.

They could have gone with an Octeon (like Ubiquiti) but I think they wanted more performance. I think that's why they went with Tilera. That and I don't know if the Octeon supports MPLS inspection in hardware. Clearly the Tilera seems to. That being said, I'm sure the Octeon could be coded to but not sure if it would be as speedy as the Tilera. My curiosity is if there's going to be a time when they get like.....multiple Tilera CPUs working in tandem in something like the new CRS switch they got going.
 
timberwolf
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Re: Does CRS125-24G support MPLS?

Fri Oct 25, 2013 9:32 am

I get my info from checking on which devices are layer 3 capable in ASICs vs which devices are layer 3 capable through a general purpose CPU. Look at the price differences between the two and you'll see that ASICs that route are NOT cheap. I will agree that the ASICs themselves aren't anywhere NEAR as expensive as they used to be, but they are still very expensive compared to a general purpose CPU. Mikrotik isn't forced to design the ASICs as they could go to like Fulcrum, or Broadcom, or Marvell. However it'd take a while for them to actually write ROS to support said silicon assuming the licensing costs don't make it prohibitively expensive.
An L3 routing capable switch, with TCAM based forwarding(so pure hardware no CPU) is around 200$ as an end product... This would be perfectly in MTs market segment.
They could have gone with an Octeon (like Ubiquiti) but I think they wanted more performance. I think that's why they went with Tilera. That and I don't know if the Octeon supports MPLS inspection in hardware. Clearly the Tilera seems to. That being said, I'm sure the Octeon could be coded to but not sure if it would be as speedy as the Tilera. My curiosity is if there's going to be a time when they get like.....multiple Tilera CPUs working in tandem in something like the new CRS switch they got going.
First of all, the Tilera SoC doesn't do anything in hardware, especially not MPLS everything has to be done in software, you can use zero-overhead-linux support from Tilera to reduce the software running on each core/tile to pure application code with no OS dependencies. On a side note, this is super expensive in terms of evelopment time. I think MT is truggling with exactly this i.e. for the Tilera to deliver high-performance MT has to rewrite all of their forwarding code, that's why we suddenly see fastpath support i suspect. ;-)

The Octeons, which get used by Ubiquiti and other, have a sort of generic high performance packet processor, MPLS would be a super simple task on this engine, I can't imagine anything simpler than 32bit label operations.
 
barkas
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Re: Does CRS125-24G support MPLS?

Fri Oct 25, 2013 2:52 pm

L2MTU is 4064
CPU clock variants are min 500/ default 600/ max 750MHz
Coo coo coo, thank you much Normis. A 25% could always help out for CPU starved situations.

Sorry if I seem harsh, but where the hell do you get your infos from?!
They aren't expensive anymore and also they aren't that difficult to make. We don't live in the 80s..
Also a small company like MikroTik isn't forced to design those ASICs themself.
If you need examples, then maybe look up the BCM56512, licensing costs may be a bit to high for MT but in that case they could use an Cavium Octeon CN5020 and have an SoC with included CPU and packet accelaration in the 2-3Gbps range.
I get my info from checking on which devices are layer 3 capable in ASICs vs which devices are layer 3 capable through a general purpose CPU. Look at the price differences between the two and you'll see that ASICs that route are NOT cheap. I will agree that the ASICs themselves aren't anywhere NEAR as expensive as they used to be, but they are still very expensive compared to a general purpose CPU. Mikrotik isn't forced to design the ASICs as they could go to like Fulcrum, or Broadcom, or Marvell. However it'd take a while for them to actually write ROS to support said silicon assuming the licensing costs don't make it prohibitively expensive.

They could have gone with an Octeon (like Ubiquiti) but I think they wanted more performance. I think that's why they went with Tilera. That and I don't know if the Octeon supports MPLS inspection in hardware. Clearly the Tilera seems to. That being said, I'm sure the Octeon could be coded to but not sure if it would be as speedy as the Tilera. My curiosity is if there's going to be a time when they get like.....multiple Tilera CPUs working in tandem in something like the new CRS switch they got going.
octeon is very quick and I do expect the hardware itself to be capable of mpls forwarding, on the software side it's not there yet.

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