[rstuart4133]

> I don't know how things will shake out for the Linux world and x86 packet forwarding given the trend and lack of real performance in the kernel.

That's pretty much settled isn't it? It was settled in the same way the "it got too much for the general purpose CPU" problem always gets settled - you do it in custom silicon, and define a standardised interface.

That's pretty much what happened with 3D graphics where the standardised interface was OpenGL (but now seems to be up in the air). It's also pretty much what's happened in AI with standardised libraries interfacing to custom hardware, and it's what happened with networking.

For networking, the interface standard is OpenFlow. So, if you think it's possible you will need to handle links of about 1Gbs or over in the future, you do your networking using an OpenFlow implementation like Faucet. If it's not much above 100Mb/s the Linux kernel module that implements OpenFlow, called openvswitch, will be fine. Otherwise use some custom hardware.

Openvswitch has been around since 2009 - so it's not exactly a new thing.