Thanks for the link. This is really interesting. Might you know if the talk that accompanied this is available somewhere?

Shifted from hardware intensive (ASICs, FPGAs) to software so we can do high-speed packet mangling on commodity hardware. Initially pretty involved with DPDK etc but much easier as of late with XDP+eBPF.

e.g. https://jvns.ca/blog/2017/04/07/xdp-bpf-tutorial/ https://netdevconf.org/2.1/papers/Gilberto_Bertin_XDP_in_pra... https://people.netfilter.org/hawk/presentations/OpenSourceDa...

Not the GP, but I worked in the DDoS space for a spell a few years ago, helping develop the company's 3rd generation product. Their 1st generation was ASIC-based; 2nd generation a manycore CPU (Tilera) running a custom OS mostly written in assembly; 3rd generation used the next generation of that CPU (Tile GX) which provided lots of dedicated highly-parallel network processing hardware (including a programmable coprocessor), some of which was designed following feedback from our CTO.

The Tile GX (including the hardware) was available for general-purpose use from Linux (which we ran), but could also be programmed directly to do lots of packet classification even before the packets got to the CPU and main memory (which we did). The Cavium network processor worked similarly.