On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 1:19 AM, Saku Ytti <s...@ytti.fi> wrote: > On 16 June 2016 at 06:21, Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuh...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Based on their investors, could have interesting results for much lower >> cost 100GbE whitebox switches. > > Why lower cost? The BOM isn't the expensive part, the code is the > expensive part. Only way I see this happening, is if we get open > source routing suite for the box, i.e. 0 cost software.
It shouldn't be long before we see open source routing suites (Bird, Quagga, GoBGP, etc) running on Linux (ONL, OS10, OpenSwitch). There is a P4 program that implements the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI), which provides a common interface, device independent, interface to merchant silicon. http://p4.org/p4/an-open-source-p4-switch-with-sai-support/ A quick way to do interesting things with the programmable data plane is to use P4 to augment the basic switching / routing behavior provided by SAI: moving resources from layer 2 tables to layer 3 tables, adding telemetry, adding additional control capabilities, etc.: http://blog.sflow.com/2016/06/programmable-hardware-barefoot-networks.html
