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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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
You know the image running on the Cisco 4500's Sup 7 supervisor is a variant of Linux, right?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Samba has been ditched by apple for example over GPLv3. They went out of their way to write their own SMB daemon due to the license change.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Same thing with gcc. Apple still use it, but are making preperations to dump it from xcode in favor of Clang, for the same reasons.
IOS-XR is migrating to Linux in the next major release, NX-OS (the OS for their Nexus DC kit) is built on Linux, and IOS-XE which powers most of the smaller side of new Cisco kit is also Linux.
As for Juniper they also have many products running on Linux.
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
Also other reasons, including the gcc team being reluctant to add/fix objective-c features to gcc.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Extreme networks uses linux. They are about to become the 4th largest switch manufacturer after the purchase of Enterasys who are of roughly equal size.
XOS isn't very linuxy, but it is Linux, source available from them by emailing software-at-extremenetworks.com.
In the last year or so we've basically stopped selling anything apart from extreme. Specific requests for other vendors has pretty much stopped, so Extreme has become our default offering and is generally always accepted.