One of the interesting things about threadripper and epyc systems with a lot of PCI-E 4.0 lanes on one motherboard, if your goal is not NVME disk I/O, but rather network throughput, it also provides the opportunity for a DIY approach to very high capacity multi-100GbE ethernet interface routers.

Such as a fairly low cost 4U threadripper box, running VyOS (ultimately based on a very normal debian Linux) with multiple Intel 100GbE NICs in PCI-E slots.

The Intel linux kernel (and FreeBSD) driver support for those is generally excellent and robust. Intel has had full time developers doing the Linux drivers for that series of cards since the earliest days of their 64-bit/66MHz PCI-X 10Gbps NICs about 17 years ago.

Also worth mentioning that FRR is now an official Linux Foundation supported project.

https://frrouting.org/

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/networ...