Comparison of freeware open source switch software?

Wed Jan 10 02:46:32 UTC 2018

My understanding is the same as Ricky's. At least in the Broadcom word, you
have to license the SDK from Broadcom in order to develop against it and,
more importantly, have documentation of which register does what. I don't
know if you need to license it to program the ASIC (assuming you can do it
without SDK in a sensible fashion).

My understanding was that when you buy software such as Cumulus Linux, what
you are actually paying for is the Broadcom license. You can actually go
and download Cumulus Linux and it's all open source except, you guessed it,
switchd, which is what takes the info from the linux kernel and programs it
into the hardware.

My understanding was that the rest the "open source" OSs operate the same
way.

Please, correct me if it is at all possible to buy a whitebox switch and
then load a "no cost OS" on it and it starts switching packets through
hardware.

-Andrey

--Andrey

On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 6:23 PM, Oliver O'Boyle <oliver.oboyle at gmail.com>
wrote:

> https://www.opennetworking.org/
>
> Hardware works quite well. I have a number of whitebox units deployed based
> off their designs and will be ordering more.
>
> On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 6:09 PM, Ricky Beam <jfbeam at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > 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
> >
>
>
>
> --
> :o@>
>