@Larsa: I don't understand why you seem to be against it. There are now several people just in this thread wanting Mikrotik to support the i225-v directly. Also to me it still seems that Mikrotik are actively developing the x86 version, just see latest stable release with support for new NICs, fixes, etc... We are just asking Mikrotik to support the i225-v directly, don't put more into it than that.
I'm not against anything but maybe we just talk past each other.
What I'm trying to say is that if you need to support "bare metal" installation for a ROS Appliance it's like any regular installation of Windows or Linux direkt on hardware. It means a huge undertaking to constantly sort out what public available hardware to support and commit to long time maintenance of related device drivers which is unrealistic for a company like MT.
However If you instead virtualise it all, you put the entire responsibility on the hardware manufacturers for operation and maintenance of device drivers. Also, nowadays the virtualisation has become so effective the difference in speed for I/O barely is measurable compared to a regular installation.
Bottom line, make use of CHR since it makes all much easer, both for the end user and MT as a developer. And you also get full support for I225V.
I disagree in some aspects:
despite the fact that virtualization has improved a lot year after year, virtualization overhead is real, and because of that hardware offload, hardware support, are key, specially when the virtual machine is a router passing many packets per second from and towards external hardware NIC at several gigabits per second, because of this, industry are investing heavily in network virtualization with smart-nics, DPUS and so on
is a good thing virtualize to avoid the need for the virtual machine supporting all possible variants of the underlying hardware that's ok, but when the virtual machine is a router it is favorable to improve networking performance supporting hardware nic directly
now some context
why now we are suggesting to include this drivers?
because of this:
celeron-4_nic-2_5g_small.jpg
there is a whole recent generation of cheap, small appliances based on intel x86 modern celeron cpu's at 2ghz including 4x 2.5g-intel nic, small footprint and low power draw (~25watt) and the flexibility of a x86 appliance to expand peripherals and take advantage of docker for example
sometimes when people talk about virtualization only think in big servers with many cores and several hundreds if not thousands or watts of power draw, that kind of servers have many cpu resources to spend on network virtualization, networking overhead on a hypervisor is not negligible, they are just throwing hardware and resources to the problem
this celeron cpus are powerful enough (2ghz in 4 cores with out-of-order execution) to be a very capable router but not so much to be tasked with virtualization overhead when passing many packets per second
i think is a great moment for MikroTik to take advantage of this appliances to sell CHR licenses and increase their market share
and of course provide us another option to choose when deploying MikroTik to route the world
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