When we did the research for our network appliance customers, we were very interested in NXP. Have you tried to buy Application Solutions Kit from NXP? We faced the problem of not achieving spec performance using NXP reference boards. After reaching NXP, support informed us that we should buy ASK, which would solve our problems. Unfortunately, it was beyond our research budget.
No, we haven't bought any ASKs. We have worked with them on a DPDK project and they were quite helpful when it came to debugging difficult bugs with it.
Improving the routing performance in Linux is near the top of my TODO list, however. XDP is one candidate (see https://forum.traverse.com.au/t/vyos-build-my-repo/181/5 for some results) and using the LS1088's AIOP is another possibility.
Linux is important but FreeBSD is the key to heart of majority of DYI firewall builders. I'm huge fan of your project and looking for opportunities to get hands on experience with it.
I see that support for FreeBSD going in good direction:
dsl (Dmitry) is the main developer behind the DPAA2 drivers for FreeBSD and he's done a fantastic effort so far. Myself and Bjoern (bz) have also written bits of it.
The performance has improved compared to how it was a year ago (e.g struggling to get 400mbps throughput) but there are some severe issues in -CURRENT :( I believe dsl is trying to get them fixed by 14.0-RELEASE.