Another exciting talk from the program committee
Amen to the Whitebox! Whitebox! Whitebox! chants. But the emerging creed of "Open" networking operating systems (NOS) is sadly still plagued with ASIC vendor SDKs and the proprietary and legacy baggage they carry. Vendor SDKs quarks impact control performance and dictate how control and datapath APIs look like. The SDK glue creates undue burden on operational interfaces design: config, debug-ability, and monitoring all suffer just so the NOS can adapt to the many every vendor SDKs.
The switchdev and related hardware offload interfaces revolution in Linux have matured over the last few years. They provide a singular, cleaner interface to ASIC features. No different than other hardware offloaded by Linux - the hardware vendor provides a driver and leaves the innovation to the NOS and applications.
Shrijeet Mukherjee and David Ahern have been in the dragons den of vendor SDKs and have come out scathed but wiser. In this talk they will discuss typical software architectures for a NOS and introduce a path for transitioning SDK based solutions to Switchdev and related offloads.
More info: https://www.netdevconf.org/0x12/session.html?building-a-better-nos-with-linu...
cheers, jamal
PS: Another reminder, early bird registration (currently 20% off will go up on June 1st).