Slashdot Mirror
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."
Did "Dinesh" just crawl out from under a rock?
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.
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.
It is open source, except for a userspace device driver for the forwarding ASIC. Without the driver, everything works the same, you just don't get hardware accelerated forwarding, only the normal kernel softward forwarding.
You can get the patches against Debian Wheezy here:
http://oss.cumulusnetworks.com/
The biggest difference vs EOS is that if you want to add a route to the routing table in EOS, you have to use sysdb-specific commands/APIs. With Cumulus Linux, you use "ip route add" or any other program that knows how to add routes to the Linux kernel using netlink or legacy methods. Same with ACLs, EOS has proprietary commands/APIs, Cumulus Linux uses iptables.
Also, A random Linux program will install and work fine on Cumulus Linux, whereas it usually takes a (small, but real) amount of work to make that happen on EOS. I've even installed and run Firefox from the Debian repo onto a switch, and it worked fine.
- nolan
CTO/Cofounder, Cumulus Networks