MikroTik

Would love to see some devices with hardware NAT.

+1

Enviado desde mi XT925 usando Tapatalk 2

+1 .

+1 +1

hello,

72cores are not enough ?

...Wait till there will be 10k cores and 1k cores for control these 10k cores

What is "hardware NAT"? I didn't realize there was more than one type.

hello
hardware nat means that the nat is done in chip not through the sw in other words its like a gpu video acceleration in games.

Aleksander

agree

+100500

I can see how you could get a performance gain, but in reality how much NAT needs to be done before that gain is realized? With as powerful as some of these RBs are (or x86 units), I can't see it benefiting me a whole lot. I imagine this is geared more towards the CGNAT crowd?

how much NAT needs to be done before that gain is realized

In a provider network, the latency should be kept at a very small value (ideally in the us range for each device), and even more importantly should be kept constant so that there will be no added jitter to packets.

A hardware processing (something like a FPGA or ASIC for example) can keep a constant and very low latency (for example all packets on all ports could be routed in a couple clock pulses).

Another advantage of hardware processing is that regardless what you do at the software layer, hardware processing should stay bugfree (as soon as the hardware logic is bugfree).


Multicore is a lot better than singlecore processing, but it is still serial processing, this mean that latency cannot be constant and bugs can be introduced more easily.

That would be a very nice feature.
But let me ask, if Mikrotik routers will have such a feature, wouldn't we lose some features, which couldn't be solved by HW?

+1 +1

http://www.taifatech.com/files/TF470_Pr ... ief_02.pdf

http://www.taifatech.com/files/TF480-Pr ... -04-08.pdf

Something like these? It is enough for 100M uplink. But if we need 1G or 10GE wire-speed NAT then we need something like this + TCAM + design + garnish:

http://www.marvell.com/network-processors/xelerated-ax/

It would be a little bit expensive but who know?

how much NAT needs to be done before that gain is realized

In a provider network, the latency should be kept at a very small value (ideally in the us range for each device), and even more importantly should be kept constant so that there will be no added jitter to packets.

Not a good idea, really. Hardware implementations always imposes some scalability issues which on the other hand can be dealt by upgrading CPU/NPU and memory resources on software implementations. A quite good solution to deal with jitter issues on software implementations is to dedicate a CPU/NPU core or two just to handle data plane processing and keep control plane processing away from those cores. You also need to realize that a data plane does much much more than just NATing packets before handing them to a forwarding plane. For example classifying, filtering, queuing, accounting and so on. Implementing some part of a router on hardware would not gain a noticeably better latency because most of processing still uses software and you would trple the manufacturing costs of a router device. Not to mention about inability to add new features to NAT processing later on products' life cycle.

Best Regards,
Ilari Stenroth

I think FastTrack can respond to your needs in the high bandwidth (1Gbps and 10Gbps) NAT.
so view this topic http://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=96302

I think FastTrack can respond to your needs in the high bandwidth (1Gbps and 10Gbps) NAT.
so view this topic http://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=96302

I enabled FastTrack last month, and it turn out to be slowing down all my connections since i use it in combined with PCC loading balancing.

Hardware NAT is supported by some routers with a MTK chip in it, and it really speed everything up.

+1 +1

But wait NO....

Don't get me wrong here. I'm all for doing stuff in asic/fpga instead of cpu... But providers doing NAT?! Please don't IPv4 space is scarce I know but:
Please make IPV6 work so we may sooner then later shut down ipv4 and be gone with all nat that is breaking all kind of protocols.

We then face nat64 witch is a predetermistic nat system that could easly be offloaded to an fpga or something.

Hardware accelerated NAT has long existed in MT routers
for example RB750Gr3 based on MT7621A
https://www.mediatek.com/products/homeNetworking/mt7621
or RB3011 based on IPQ8064
https://www.qualcomm.com/products/ipq8064
https://people.netfilter.org/pablo/netd ... ion_v2.pdf

@mikruser What are you talking about in this 7 years old topic?