Router Forwarding Engines: Part 5 (opens in new tab)

Let’s take one final look at forwarding planes and accelerated forwarding planes before we leave this topic. What if you wanted to develop a device specializing in processing and switching packets, but the capabilities you need to develop are unavailable in any commercial hardware forwarding engine? While one option would certainly be DPDK, discussed in the previous post in this series, there is another, more recent option: Extended Berkeley Packet Filters (eBPF).