Why are PeeCee Unix routers doomed?

This list is somewhat redundant to the L3 switch comparison table.

• Release engineering. The zeroth reason they're doomed: exotic features are usually broken because there's no decent release process for a BSD router with PF, ipsec-tools racoon, Quagga, Asterisk, some obscure Sangoma T1 card, and a Hifn IPsec accelerator. You'll never get all that stuff working again. If you do, upgrade BSD to the next BSD formal release, and it'll take a year to find everything that broke, including weird performance regressions, and another year to fix it. And there's no unified config file to do change management all in one place or to save your work across software upgrades.
• Low forwarding capacity. I expect brand new fancy PeeCees can forward not more than about 5Gbit/s, and that's with big packets. My old Alpine 3808 can, according to other people's tests, forward small packets in and out of its twenty-four gigabit interfaces concurrently.
• High jitter. Since everything's process-switched in a PeeCee, a packet being forwarded has to contend with all the other complex software running on the PeeCee's control plane. Sometimes it'll get stuck behind some other computation.
• High forwarding delay. I think even the best case forwarding delay is pretty long, although I'm not sure this honestly matters. If I were to test, I'd try iSCSI or seek-heavy NFS (small random reads).
• Low port density. With old L3 switches costing less than $100 including shipping, I have 48 100Mbit/s ports, and I can assign them to separate VLAN's on 48 different subnets if I want to. My PeeCee router with fancy quad-port Ethernet cards (which seem to be quite slow) only has eight ports.
• No line-rate QoS. We would like at least RED for TCP flows. Two or three levels of priority might be nice, too, or maybe even WRED. These are basic features needed by high-performance TCP.

  ECN might be nice, too---I'm not yet sold on its value, but the idea sure has been around a long time to still not have it.

  The Ethernet MAC chips used in PeeCee's already have priority levels, although drivers don't seem to do anything with them (Solaris seems to be looking into it). I don't think they have RED, but it's not such a demanding feature---the problem is that chip designers often don't understand the features they're implementing, but if they learn to give two or three specific knobs to the driver, I think it can't be done wrongly. The MAC chips are already calculating IP checksums (``offloading'' features: of IP, TCP, UDP checksums and TCP segmentation are already in the Unix drivers of a couple gigabit chips), so asking them to do ECN is not crazy---they could calculate the IP checksum the instant before transmission, in case the mark changed.

  BUT, none of this is happening yet! And L3 switches all do at least RED and priority queueing if not more.

All that said, PeeCee's are still much cheaper, so eBay is the real reason why I am changing to L3 switches at this moment. Here are the pieces of my Extreme Alpine 3808 and their costs, including shipping:

item	cost
Alpine 3808 includes 4 gigabit MTRJ and 4 1000BaseT and 64 100Mbit/s.	$651.98
GM-4Xi 4 1000BaseX GBIC slots	$21.99
GM-4Xi x 2 4 1000BaseX GBIC slots each	$24.99
GM-4Ti 4 1000BaseT	$118.00
GBIC x2	$43.40
GBIC x6	$18.00
GBIC x1	$12.98
Total	$891.34

Total ports:

1000BaseSX	16
1000BaseT	8
100BaseTX	64