Juniper has always used a (heavily hacked) FreeBSD core running on an embedded PC platform (Intel-based Routing Engine) for JUNOS that did all (or most) of the protocol related stuff and left the actual forwarding of packets to a specialized core of ASICs (The Packet Forwarding Engine).
This has changed in recent years with some lower-level protocols being handled on the line-cards themselves on newer platforms. The vast majority of the protocols still run on the Routing Engine though.
Yeah, sorry, I was talking about the control plane stuff. Does Juniper use any of the original FreeBSD IP stack for its control plane or exception path stuff?
Juniper has always used a (heavily hacked) FreeBSD core running on an embedded PC platform (Intel-based Routing Engine) for JUNOS that did all (or most) of the protocol related stuff and left the actual forwarding of packets to a specialized core of ASICs (The Packet Forwarding Engine).
This has changed in recent years with some lower-level protocols being handled on the line-cards themselves on newer platforms. The vast majority of the protocols still run on the Routing Engine though.