Comparison of freeware open source switch software?

Tue Jan 9 16:52:07 UTC 2018

> > Not necessarily true anymore.  Look for SwitchDev, which is
> > incorporated into the Linux kernel , is undergoing continuous
> > improvement, and allows the kernel to offload forwarding rules to the
> hardware.
> 
> The overall architecture of openswitch, however, seems (to me) to be
> focused on software implementations, rather than hardware.

I suppose that could be a fair statement, to a certain degree.  But when you strip away all the abstracted things it does, and get into the core of the product, you find an OpenFlow engine, which at the heart, is a mechanism for defining traffic rules.  Many of those rules translate easily into the kernel's forwarding information base.  And the kernel's FIB can easily be two-way sync'd with hardware.

So, to take this to the logical conclusion, other than for the interesting rules which can be created in OVS or FRR, it is possible to do away with OVS/FRR, and use only Linux itself with iproute2 and bridge commands to drive the hardware directly with no further abstraction or vendor black boxes.

And, rather than using a J or a C syntax, you use an /etc/network/interfaces syntax for permanence. 

https://blog.raymond.burkholder.net/
Raymond Burkholder

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