External BGP Controller for L3 Switch BGP routing

Vincent Bernat bernat at luffy.cx
Mon Jan 16 14:06:11 UTC 2017


 ❦ 16 janvier 2017 14:08 +0200, Saku Ytti <saku at ytti.fi> :

> I wonder if true whitelabel is possible, would some 'real' HW vendor,
> of BRCM size, release HW docs openly? Then some integrator could start
> selling the HW with BOM+10-20%, no support, no software at all. And
> community could build the actual software on it.
> It seems to me, what is keeping us away from near-BOM prices is
> software engineering, and we cannot do it as a community, as HW docs
> are not available.

Mellanox with switches like the SN2700. I don't know how open is the
hardware documentation, but they are pushing support for their ASIC
directly into Linux (look at drivers/net/ethernet/mellanox/mlxsw). They
are also contributing to the switchdev framework which will at some
point allow transparent acceleration of the Linux box (switching,
routing, tunneling, firewalling, etc.), as we already have with
CumulusOS.

The datasheet is quite scarce. There is a 88k L2 forwarding entries but
no word for L3. Buffer sizes are not mentioned. But I suppose that
someone interested would be able to get more detailed information.
-- 
"Elves and Dragons!" I says to him.  "Cabbages and potatoes are better
for you and me."
		-- J. R. R. Tolkien



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