[Soekris] Fwd: Mistletoe Tech

[Austin Murphy]

On 8/26/06, Justin Thomas <justindthomas at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> Would there be value in putting one of these chips on a PCI or mini-PCI card
> to be used in a Soekris box?
>
> http://www.mistletoetech.com/index.php
>
> I just read about this technology in InformationWeek and it immediately
> piqued my curiosity.  I'm not sure how it integrates (does it replace an
> Ethernet chip, or does it act like an SSL accelerator to offload security
> operations, et cetera) but I think it sounds interesting.

If you can wade through the hype, this page has a good review:
http://www.analogzone.com/netp0522.htm

Also wikipedia has a spammy, but somewhat helpful page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistletoe_Technologies

It looks like ethernet traffic is supposed to come in on one port and
leave by a second, never going across a PCI bus.  The core of it
appears to be a stream processor that talks to ethernet chips.  Your
firewall/IDS/spam/etc. filter rules are translated into a special
grammar that the chip understands and the chip parses all the incoming
packets with that grammar.  It has a crypto accelerator module (like
the HiFn) bolted on.

So instead of using a normal CPU to do the packet parsing and
manipulation, it pushes that function down into specialized silicon
and changes the configuration interface from a config file to a custom
grammar.

I could see a soekris box/board being useful as the host system that
runs an OS to manage a chip like this.  It may need more DC power and
it won't be cheap.  It looks like the price of the chip alone
is near a couple thousand dollars.

Austin