[c-nsp] IOS Upgrade to SXI3

[Tim Durack]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 11:40 AM, Gert Doering <gert at greenie.muc.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 04:12:59PM +0000, Mackinnon, Ian wrote:
>> > Well, in theory it should at least have the benefit of proper memory
>> > protection between processes, and thus, less likely to crash the whole
>> > box if a process does stupid things.
>> >
>> Interesting, so given the email earlier today by somebody experiencing
>> BGP problems at a well known IX with lots of sessions where the other
>> end is shut down, would this have still been an issue?
>
> I'm not really sure what is happening there - but I doubt that modular
> would help much with "a process is burning CPU needlessly".
>
>> It's been a while since I looked at modular, but is there not a large
>> "IOS" process that is most things in one place anyway?
>
> I'm not exactly sure how it works.  There's different kinds of processes,
> some of them having "sub-processes".
>
> The one that has BGP in it is "iprouting.iosproc".  All the "old IOS stuff"
> seems to be "ios-base".

We've been running 12.2SX Modular IOS on a set of SUP720s for over a
year. It hasn't done us any good. Still suffer from memory/cpu issues.
Modular will burn at least an extra 10% cpu, and won't give any
observable benefits. With the removal of install/patching in SXI3, we
have decided to move back to monolithic.

Cisco doesn't appear to have the engineering resources and/or
will-power to move IOS into the 20th Century (pre-emptive multitasking
with memory and process containment.) It is more beneficial for them
to sell you new products with "better" versions of IOS.

Tim:>