Category: Switching

Peter Weymann sent me a really intriguing question:

A few days ago I started reading the Ciscopress book End-to-End Network Security: Defense-in-Depth and stumbled over the scheduler command. This one could be used to allocate time that the cpu spends on fast switching packets or process switching packets, if I understand it correctly. They also mention interrupting CPU processes but honestly I don't really understand how it works.

Cisco routers support (at least) three forms of layer-3 switching (formerly known as routing). CEF switching and fast switching are performed entirely within the interrupt context (I/O adapter interrupts a process the CPU is currently executing and all the work is done before the process resumes). Process switching is performed in two steps: packet is briefly analysed within the interrupt context and requeued into the IP Input process where it's eventually switched. Almost all I/O adapters used these days use a concept of RX/TX rings to communicate with the CPU, meaning that the CPU potentially has to handle more than one packet for each interrupt.

After leaving us in the dark for almost a year, Cisco finally released new functionality in IOS release 12.4(20)T. Support for a number of hardware platforms has been removed (dynamips fans are left with the 7200’s, everything else is gone). They also removed two switching features: fast switching and label-controlled ATM (cell-mode MPLS-over-ATM) together with Label Switch Controller (LSC).

Harold Arley Morales has asked an interesting question:

What's the difference between Cisco Express Forwarding and Cisco MLS? Is Cisco's implementation of MLS standardized?

CEF is a routing table lookup mechanism. Instead of doing a lookup in the main IP routing table (displayed with the show ip route), the router does a lookup in a fully computed non-recursive version of the IP routing table (Forwarding Information Base - FIB) with layer-2 next-hop information attached to it (adjacency table).