Comparison of freeware open source switch software?

Ricky Beam jfbeam at gmail.com
Tue Jan 9 23:09:49 UTC 2018


On Tue, 09 Jan 2018 02:17:59 -0500, Hank Nussbacher <hank at efes.iucc.ac.il>  
wrote:
> so to clarify I am interested only in bare-metal or whitebox swicthes
> and freeware, open source software.

It's my understanding that there simply is no such thing. Because none of  
the HARDWARE has open source code. Sure, anyone can write software to  
spirit packets between NICs (linux and *BSD has had that capability for  
decades.) But doing that "at scale" with the various manufacturers SoCs  
requires vendor specific code to setup and control the chip. The broadcom  
"NDK" is just a shim on top of a pre-compiled proprietary SDK blob.

--Ricky



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