[Xorp-hackers] PIMDM support??

Orion Hodson hodson@icir.org
Thu, 09 Oct 2003 10:33:30 -0700


/-- "edrt" wrote:
| Hi, 
|   I'm new to Xorp, and recently I dig into PIMSM module, beautiful code, grea
| t done.

This is all the work of Pavlin Radoslavov.

| Does Xorp has plan to add PIMDM support to the platform?

AFAIK, it's not on the radar.  If you are interested probably best talk to 
Pavlin.

| And can anyone explain me the pros and cons of implementing protocol and 
| routing platform in C++ as compare using C? Especially will the C++
| implementation result efficiency lost?

The trade-off for C++ vs C is the same as for any application.  There are many many of discussions on this in textbooks and the www.  We're not likely to present anything new here.

>From an open-source perspective, coding in C++ potentially raises the bar for people fixing problems or implementing new functionality.  This is a concern as far as getting community involvement.  Hopefully documentation and code examples will help.  We're interested in making the C++ code available in other languages, perhaps through SWIG, to make faster prototyping and testing viable and to provide access for people who don't like C++.

As far as efficiency goes, it obviously depends on what you are measuring.  We have a largish memory footprint but are aiming to run on commodity PC hardware and assume that memory is not an issue in the same way it is if you are running an embedded box or something like a Cisco.  Likewise, we have plenty of CPU power on the target boxes (lowest end in our testbed is a 486).  Standard profiling tools for performance can be applied as and when it becomes necessary.

Kind Regards
- Orion