> "Values up to 999G are supported, more than enough for interfaces today and the future." - Article

Especially given that IEEE 802.3dj is working on 1.6T / 1600G, and is expected to publish the final spec in Summer/Autumn 2026:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terabit_Ethernet

Currently these interfaces are only on switches, but there are already NICs at 800G (P1800GO, Thor Ultra, ConnectX-8/9), so if you LACP/LAGG two together your bond is at 1600G.

If you're moving those kind of speeds you're probably not doing packet filtering in software.

But you may be using Unix-y software to manage the interfaces and do offload programming:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Packet_Processing

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptm9h-Lf0gg ("VPP: A 1Tbps+ router with a single IPv4 address")

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulus_Networks

I use VPP and handle bonded speeds of 200gbit. Not that far fetched to also do this at 1000gbit.

Probably? But if you are then you’re certainly not using OpenBSD.

Yes, we're already running 800G networks, so this phrasing seems really silly to me.

Honestly, I'm really curious about this number. 10bits is 1024, so why 999G specifically?

Looking at the patch itself (linked in the article), the description has this:

> We now support configuring bandwidth up to ~1 Tbps (overflow in m2sm at m > 2^40).

So I think that's it, 2^40 is ~1.099 trillion

Looks like an arbitrary validation cap. By the time we're maxing out the 64-bit underlying representation we probably won't be using Ethernet any more.

> By the time we're maxing out the 64-bit underlying representation we probably won't be using Ethernet any more.

We will be using Ethernet until the heat death of the universe, if we survive that long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet#History (& following sections)

Calling something "Ethernet" amounts to a promise that:

- From far enough up the OSI sandwich*, you can pretend that it's a magically-faster version of old-fashioned Ethernet

- It sticks to broadly accepted standards, so you won't get bitten by cutting-edge or proprietary surprises

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model