[rescue] Perverse Question

[Eric Josephson]

On Sun, 15 Jun 2003, Robert Novak wrote:

> On Sun, 15 Jun 2003, Eric Josephson wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 15 Jun 2003, Robert Novak wrote:
> >
> > > I suspect most of the network itself runs on mc68k and powerpc on cPCI and
> > > similar blades, running code developed under Wind River or Greenhills (or
> > > something green).
> >
> > I know Watchguard used vxWorks (Wind River) in their SOHO, but not in
> > anything that needed performance.  I heard a lot of dissing of the
> > vxWorks network stack, so I'm kind of surprised it would be used in
> > anything but X servers or low-end network appliances.
>
> I heard a lot of dissing of everything. I'm kind of surprised that
> anything is used for anything.
>

Touche.

>
> One previous employer got very good performance out of Wind River/vxworks
> for PowerPC 603/604. Routing full-bore 100TX on 48 ports per board can
> strain things a bit, but we did it. Other companies have too. I don't
> remember what development environment Cisco uses, but I think it's one of
> the two.
>

I'm curious now, were they using the vxworks stack or a third-party stack?
Myself, I've only used vxworks networking over radio links, so I have no
idea what kind of performance you can expect out of it except what I've
heard from others.  More rumors and hearsay would be appreciated.  :-)

> I suspect it depends on how you develop for it. You could probably write
> a VAX assembler routine that would be dog slow for doing a binsort.
> Doesn't mean the VAX assembler can't be used for anything more
> substantial. Just means ya can't code. :)

I *like* VAX macro.  That's probably bad, isn't it.