Photo - Clint Adair - Unsplash
"Sonic on the Net"
It is an open source OS built on Linux. Debian is chosen as the base distribution. She manages switches and other network equipment from different vendors. Organizations such as Microsoft, Dell and Broadcom have contributed to the development of the system. The sources are distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. The operating system runs on x86 / 64 processors and supports the SAI (Switch Abstraction Interface) specification. It is a standardized C API for ASIC programming. The SAI project is also open source and available on GitHub .
The architecture is based on the Redis engine . It is responsible for data replication and message transfer between OS subsystems. Each of its modules is placedin a docker container: dhcp-relay, bgp, sncd and several others. In general terms, the relationship between them can be represented as follows:
Some key modules are located in the Linux host system. To work with them, a special configuration module sonic-cfggen and CLI is involved.
The project is used by the developers themselves in their own data centers and add system support to their hardware. Today, it is also used by several major Asian cloud providers to simplify IT infrastructure management. But the residents of Hacker News, who managed to work with this OS, nevertheless highlighted several disadvantages.
One of the users notedthe relative complexity of the configuration, since the documentation does not contain all the requirements for ports, interfaces and links. The project also uses Linux kernel 4.9.x, which is still supported, but lacks some networking capabilities.
Despite the openness, it can be problematic to make changes to the configuration - developers accept pull requests for previously approved and planned issues.
Photo - Philipp Katzenberger - Unsplash
If you want to try out the system and decide for yourself whether you are interested in this project or not, you can start with the wiki page and documentation . There is a how-to for developers on deployment , testingand working with SAI . The latest news about the project can be found at the office. portal .
Open Networked Linux
This distribution of the Linux ( GitHub ), developed by the cloud company, purchased by Arista Networks earlier this year to work on the switches. It is part of the NOS (Network Operating System) technology stack, which is also part of the SONiC project.
The system is supported by major representatives of the IT market - for example, the manufacturer of network solutions Edgecore Networks , as well as Google and Facebook . In 2015, representatives of the Open Compute Project named the Open Network Linux (ONL) distribution as a reference network OS.
Open Network Linux has an agent based on OF-DPA (OpenFlow Data Plane Abstraction) that allows OpenFlow to be used on switches with Broadcom fabrics. The current version of the operating system is based on Linux kernel 4.14.109. It is installed on switches through the standardized Open Network Install Environment (ONIE). It is also being developed as part of the Open Compute Project.
The target audience of this operating system is small cloud providers and companies offering SaaS solutions. ONL and NOS stack authors hopethat their project will simplify the development of switches and other network hardware for the mass market, contribute to the development of the IT industry and popularize the very concept of open network operating systems.
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