[Xorp-hackers] Questions on the architecture

[Pavlin Radoslavov]

> Having the sockets opened only in FEA makes sense in light of what you are 
> trying to accomplish design-wise. You could of course accomplish the same 
> thing through a generic shared library, which would avoid the cost of the 
> indirection of the FEA, but as you pointed out you are not pushing gigabytes 
> of data, so this hardly matters.

Another reason for opening the sockets via the FEA is if you are
in the space of building distributed routers where you have a farm
of machines. For example, one or several of them would be used for
forwarding by running the FEA only, and the rest of the machines
would be used only for computations by running the protocol
instances. In that case, you may want the protocol control messages
to be transmitted and received via the machines running the FEA,
which will act as a proxy for opening the sockets.

Regards,
Pavlin