MikroTik – RouterOSv7 first look – L3 ASIC performance testing

When MikroTik announced the CRS3xx series switches a few years ago, one of the most exciting aspects of that news release was the prospect of L3 forwarding in hardware on very inexpensive devices.
A quick review of the Marvell Prestera ASIC family showed a number of advanced routing, switching, MPLS and VxLAN capabilites.
Fast forward to 2020, where MikroTik has started to enable some of those features in RouterOS v7 beta.
Now we can finally take some of the CRS3xx switches and test their capabilities with L3 forwarding performance in hardware
CRS 3xx series capabilities overview
Before getting into the testing, it’s probably helpful to review some of the basic specs and capabilities of the CRS3xx switch line.
Here is a chart from MikroTik that outlines ACL rule count, Unicast FDB entries and MTU size.
CRS 3xx model comparison

MIkroTik has been working on the development of the features listed below to offload into hardware.
For the tests in this article, we’ll be using IPv4 Unicast and Inter-VLAN routing.
Supported feature list

Currently, the following switches are supported.
For the testing in this article, we are using the CRS317-1G-16S+
Switches supported by 7.1beta2


Performance testing – overview
The physical Continue reading
Why bother clicking ?




