[Xorp-hackers] Questions on the architecture

[Adam Greenhalgh]

On Wed, 2005-02-09 at 11:05 -0800, Pavlin Radoslavov wrote:
> > 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.
> 

Using the FEA to allocate sockets makes the task of sand boxing
protocols easier, since it is possible through the FEA to rate limit
messages to a particular protocol or examine the information passing to
a protocol for abnormalities. 

Adam