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Your Next Network Operating System Is Linux
jrepin writes "Everywhere you look, change is afoot in computer networking. As data centers grow in size and complexity, traditional tools are proving too slow or too cumbersome to handle that expansion. Dinesh Dutt is Chief Scientist at Cumulus Networks. Cumulus has been working to change the way we think about networks altogether by dispensing with the usual software/hardware lockstep, and instead using Linux as the operating system on network hardware. In this week's New Tech Forum, Dinesh details the reasons and the means by which we may see Linux take over yet another aspect of computing: the network itself."
If you can't make your goal just change the goal posts.
Network and SAN will go (are already going) virtual the same way hardware has.
Did "Dinesh" just crawl out from under a rock?
Linux is already widely used on networking gear, especially fully pre-emptive variants like RT-Linux and Monta-Vista.
It will still take considerable time to displace some of the real performance/uptime critical stuff that's done using VxWorks and QNX and a number of other proprietary systems. Many companies are sort of vendor locked and have non-portable software too and so can't change easily. There are also engineers out there who strongly believe that what the currently use is superior for things like uptime (QNX), and simplistic hard real time response (VxWorks). I'm not saying that's the case either way - I'm simply saying there are numerous industry players who won't adopt Linux for some time because they think it's too big and not good enough.
It's hard to beat free.Wish the article had touched on "traditional tools" a little more. They didn't really go into specifics. I've got some experience there, but it would have been nice to see their take on it.
The Chinese have been using Busybox for years. I still have two routers that use Busybox - the Swiss Army Knife of embedded Linux.
linky.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Juniper uses FreeBSD as its OS? NetApp uses FreeBSD (or at least a heavily customized version of it.)
Not everyone has gone with Linux but I suppose the majority have. Still, as long as its Unix embedded and not something crazy like Windows...
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
As much as I would like to see Linux / BSD being used to power network devices (and I admit that it's already happening), it's going to be a long time before most enterprises ditch their Cisco gear for equipment that runs an open source OS. Many large enterprises have already made significant investments in hardware and personnel. Even if a vendor were to come along with an excellent product at a great price point it would probably be at least 5-10 years before most enterprises move away from their Cisco switches, routers and other appliances. Don't get me wrong -- I'd like to see Cisco's dominance challenged, and to see a Linux / BSD based CLI used to configure network equipment instead of IOS -- but it seems unlikely in the near future.
Facts have a liberal bias.
A network is only as good as the people who implement and maintain it.
Sadly, Apollo Computer had this concept 20+ years ago. The Apollo Domain Operating System was built from the ground up as a network operating system. Everything from the kernel up was designed with networking in mind. It was a brilliant yet ultimately dead operating system. The biggest downfall was being expensive and proprietary. Sun Microsystems won through a cheaper alternative and doomed us forever with NFS.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
As it stands now, a Linux iptables list is sequential. Packets go through the input/output/forward queues.
If one wants a true network OS, this needs to be changed to a config-based system similar to what Cisco/Alcatel-Lucent/Juniper use. With this, each adapter gets a configuration attached for starters, then things go from there (VLANs, ACLs, etc.)
If Linux could make the jump from sequential parsing to configs, it might just be something that can do the job, but then it moves to the hardware, and a lot of routers have specific ASICs dedicated to packet crunching as opposed to general CPUs.
between bsd and linux all the network hardware is running mostly the same or similar code. juniper, cisco, citrix, etc. this article would have been more relevant in 2003.
TFA did not mention details. Linux has patent-inhibited memory management complications. The best networking OS will be able to handle 2^32 connections (or about 4.2 billion). No OS can come near this. Is Linux better than the alternatives? Never, as long as its memory footprint is inhibited by patents. A good networking OS will be scale-free. (for those graduate students looking for a thesis). Thus, the best networking OS is the most fault-tolerant with the best throughput, and the smartest engineers behind it. No OS is fault-tolerant. Throughput is a function of memory (all things being equal), and the smartest engineers are probably challenged to maintain a quality of life that is satisfactory. It's a great question of what the best NOS is. Keep it coming, but don't muddy up the waters with misinformation. If you do make a suggestion, provide real empirical support. (It's not my job to do this since I have not declared what the best NOS is. I do have my opinions though.)
I think many slashdot'rs will read this as "Your next network will use electricity." I am pretty sure most people around here have networks that are close to 100% Linux. Maybe the occasional switch or whatnot is running something proprietary.
BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...it's succeeding in becoming its fanbois worst enemy's mirror image: Ubiquitous, inescapable, and actually dragging us all down because of that. Including hysterical over-the-top marketing from both.
We need more, better choices, not yet another rehash of this same thing. This isn't innovation. This is stagnation. Useful, nicely low cost, but stagnation for all that.
I don't think that is true. Like the joke about the duck (all quiet up top, but paddling like heck underneath), Linux is continually evolving. Sometimes big steps and big improvements and sometimes small steps. Sometimes even steps that back up and take another direction. That's a feature, BTW. The Linux ecosystem has shown over and over that nothing is sacred. If there is a better way to do things then somebody somewhere is going to try it with Linux.
Linux on a core switch is like Windows running on a phone - it'll work, but it's clearly not the right tool for the job. I see a lot of small to medium routers running BSD, and that's a good fit, but just look at a Catalyst 6500 supervisor card or switch card and imagine Linux running on that... there's so much custom hardware designed solely for handling packets that a general-purpose OS / kernel like Linux simply cannot handle it.
Oh, and Cisco-style config files are great, thanks. We've all been using an IOS or IOS-alike interface for a few decades now, and it's stuck around, much like bash, and C, because it does what it does very well, and nothing better has yet been found. Iptables is a mess by comparison, and I will not mourn its passing.
"Linux has patent-inhibited memory management complications .. Is Linux better than the alternatives? Never, as long as its memory footprint is inhibited by patents"
..
What specific patents are you referring to here, please provide links to the citations
Buzzwordy market-speak summary pointing to the personal blog of an unknown company?
Thanks, Timothy.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Cisco NX-OS is based on MontaVista Software embedded Linux.
Cisco's Nexus line running NX-OS uses some type of Linux.
Back in the day, a network operating system was something that could run a file, print, and sometimes database services. Nowadays when the firmware of printers and NAS devices provide those services, I question the use of the term NOS at all.
Sure you can use different firmware bases for network hardware, but it's not like you can arbitrarily install whatever you want on such devices.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
happened. NXOS is the Cisco datacenter OS that is *already* based on a Linux kernel. Geez, Cisco's ASA appliances made the move from iOS to Linux years ago. Your next network operating system = your existing network operating system. Wake up/Redundancy/Get a life/I pity you because you've wasted everyone's time.
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
So this is the year of the Linux "everything except the desktop": phones, tablets, networks, servers, entertainment units, cars, everything with Android, etc... even your Chromebook. But not your desktop.
Yet.
I am anarch of all I survey.
too late..
nexus, asa, asr etc.
Everything runs linux or bsd..
juniper, netscaler etc.
even iptables..
Too commercial. Add news or something that matters?
It will also be my primary OS when Windows 7 dies out. Especially if Valve can make Linux gaming viable. Other than games, most softwares I daily use have a linux version or easily found linux alternatives... Dual boot is not an option for me, I don't want to have to reboot every time I want to play a game and then reboot again when I'm done. I don't understand why people would do that to themselves, seems like a waste of time and at one point I would just not bother switching back and forth and only stay on one OS. And let's face it... Wine is good... but it's not good enough.
Sorry, I can't find anything of substance in this (worthless, InfoWorld) article. There's a handful of reasons why "Linux will be the next network OS" isn't holding any water:
* First and foremost, it's the license. No hardware vendor out there wants to be stuck supporting software in the way that a GPL'd product often requires. They want to control the platform, and they can't do that if it's truly open.
* Second, Linux has had iptables (and the menagerie of other tools) to make it a 'network OS' for years and years. It hasn't helped it gain much traction except in the SMB/home router market demographic.
* Third, Linux is lacking some of the important things that are necessary for network equipment these days - or at least, not as elegantly as other "free" options.
* There are many vendors which offer network equipment which does NOT run on Linux: Juniper, NET10, and pfSense based products all come to mind (and I've personally seen pfSense successfully blow Cisco solutions out of the water in price, redundancy, and performance with a markedly more capable configuration).
* Oh yeah, and nothing he says in the article is in any way exclusive to Linux; it can just as easily be applied to eg. FreeBSD or OpenBSD.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a dyed in the wool Linux fiend... but Linux doesn't really shine in this department.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Busybox is just a binary that's used for userland applications. It will run on at least *bsd next to linux kernels.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Customized UNIX kernels are being used today (mostly BSD) by a variety of vendors. These are heavily modified to support hardware (ASICS, etc.) based switching and routing. On top of that the OS needs to handle packet caching (for QoS), access lists and security features, encryption (VPN tunneling), etc. Most of which are handled in highly customized proprietary bits of hardware that can reliably handle a tonne of traffic flows. In my opinion, network hardware vendors will never hamstring their competitive edge by agreeing to standardized APIs and hardware calls.
Most current high available networking gear has an OS on a "general maintenance processor" that is used to handle the user interface. All the packet mangling is done in ASICs or on daughter boards running other OSes.
Also, IPtables isn't a shell script, it's a binary that is used to manipulate kernel network filters. Once the tables are set up, packets don't leave the kernel, unless you use the userland filter kernel module. I've only seen one commercial linux packet mangling setup that does this and it performs horrendously bad. It was a data counting and billing setup for mobile internet and it required an 8 core Xeon with 16G of ram per 100Mbit. Interestingly, it wasn't the amount of Mbits that went through, but the amount of IP sessions that were being set up per second that was the real bottleneck here. The whole thing checked with a central accounting processor to see if the user still had data rights left and got a lease for 64kbyte of data from the user's quota. Needless to say the setup was high on the list of things to phase out because it was mushrooming out of proportion at an alarming rate.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Very few network devices actually run Linux currently. There are a few, both consumer and enterprise, but they are not all that common. When you look at the big boys most of the underlying operating systems are either BSD or VxWorks. Juniper is BSD, Dell is VxWorks for power connect and BSD for force 10, Cisco is QNX for their new high-end stuff, and so on. Linux is in there and is growing, but is not a huge player at this time. Most routers and switches run something else. This is particularly true given Cisco's dominance and their use of IOS.
That aside, the underlying kernel really isn't very interesting in terms of a networking device. Most of the actual work is being done by various ASICs and network processors such as IBM's Power NP. The OS is just used to load basic things, and tie it altogether. So just because a given switch runs Linux doesn't mean that anything it does would be useful on a larger scale. We achieve the speed we do in routing and switching to hardware acceleration, not by simply having everything running software on a general-purpose machine.
In terms of big stuff Juniper and Cisco are the kings. When you look at enterprise networks, they comprise the most by far. Well, neither of them use Linux. Juniper uses FreeBSD as the basis for JUNOS. Cisco's IOS, that most of their devices still run, it really is their own operating system. It is slightly POSIX-based, I suppose, but not really related to anything else. IOS XR is based on QNX a real-time operating system. That accounts for most of the high-end and even more midrange network gear out there. Dell is another big supplier and there's no Linux they are as of yet. Their power connect devices use VxWorks as the fundamental OS underneath. Their force 10 devices use net BSD as the fundamental OS.
At the consumer level it varies, the little routers that you buy in your house when varying OSes. Linux is not uncommon, but VxWorks is also quite popular.
In 2000 my next operating system on network hardware was linux. In 2013 it's looking just as likely to be FreeBSD.
Did this article travel down a wormhole from 2000?
Why use Linux when you could use OpenBSD? We've been running OpenBSD routers for quite some time now and their networking is far better, consistent and more robust than in Linux. Just having PF alone is reason enough to use OpenBSD.
-Matt
But one point dwarves everything else...
Really? Not even if you're Walt Disney.
"Dwarves" is a plural NOUN, but the author's use was as a VERB. That should have been "dwarfs", as in "makes small".
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
verify license validity... :)
http://vmblog.com/archive/2008/12/15/patent-problem-for-a-future-linux-feature-called-ksm.aspx#.UmUaxCTKDk8
http://diplomovka.sme.sk/zdroj/2847.pdf (page 36)
http://www.zdnet.com/torvalds-worries-about-patents-and-slow-storage-1339285687/
"ext, it is now possible to treat the router OS as nothing more than a megaserver -- that is, a server with 64 or 128 NICs. " ..hum... ~90 GT/sec enabled CPU / bus, assuming these are gigabit Ethernet NetworkInterfaceCards?
ya-ha and that would need like a
I have no idea why this is rated -1. Yeah, I get that the common parlance uses "Linux" to mean the whole works, but like it says in parent's link, that's kind of unfair and misleading.
Are Linux powered.
News at 11: Upper management totally disconnected from reality.
Linux is good for some things but as a network OS, OpenBSD is far better for security and routing. I would use Linux maybe as an internet server or desktop OS but OpenBSD hands down for anything security and network related. The Linux kernel may have a fast robust network stack but it's tool chain is an ineffective quagmire of different projects with different leadership. OpenBSD has a unified, open source tool chain all driven under the direction of a single organization. I would argue that the inefficient Linux networking tool chain renders any benefit a moot point.
Patent problem for a future Linux feature called KSM
This one from about 2008, not much progress in five years if someone were to claim IP violations.
Note: this mechanism is covered by some patents in U.S.A
That also from 2006, and currently still no mention of what patents exactly are violated by the use of this mechanism.
Torvalds worries about patents and slow storage
That from Feb 2008, seems to be a good enough time passed for any such patent issues to appear.
All of our core switches are running real time linux and have so for many years. Linux became a network OS back in 2008, if not much earlier. Basically the only place it's not running is on edge switches and even there you can find switches that running it.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Do you suppose Apple would have used it under any other open license? Writing their own is pretty normal for Apple.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
Will someone design a better gui for all these terminal commands?
Not so new Cisco NX-OS runs on a striped down Linux shell, of course all you see is the Cisco IOS.
Good grief! I was sure it said your next HOME operating system. :P