[kijiki]

> That sort of mechanism doesn't map nicely into the Linux interface paradigm (unless you do things like exporting kernel routes into the hardware, but that's borderline absurd).

Not absurd at all. Cumulus (which I cofounded) does exactly that. There are >1000 customers, including several of the largest cloud operators in the world.

It works really well in practice, since you can just fall back to the kernel for non-fast-path stuff like ARP. IOS/NXOS implement ARP (and everything else) themselves. We can just use the kernel's implementation.

The idea is essentially to use the lightning fast forwarding ASIC as a hardware accelerator for the networking functionality the kernel already has.