Your Next Network Operating System Is Linux 192
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."
And this is news why? (Score:4, Insightful)
Did "Dinesh" just crawl out from under a rock?
Juniper uses FreeBSD (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Stating the obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bah (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Apollo Computer - Domain Operating System (Score:2, Insightful)
You realize that NFS and iptables have almost nothing in common right? Oh wait, you DONT, else you wouldn't have written such a crap post.
Re:Already happening - slowly (Score:0, Insightful)
That's because Linux as a whole operating system doesn't exist. Linux is just a kernel, and one that is requires optimization by excluding parts that the system will not have and will not use. But it's not as compact and efficient as VxWorks or QNX, and not as stable as FreeBSD (Hell between all the gear I have access to , the FreeBSD systems have 2 years of uptime, where as most of the Linux systems have less than 90 days because "system" and "data center" administrators reboot the physical hardware when there is a problem instead of actual troubleshooting. One of my newest clients I keep having to tell him "DO NOT REBOOT THE LINUX SERVERS, YOU ARE GENERATING MORE DOWNTIME BY DOING SO!"
Sometimes I really hate linux's way of load control, or rather the lack of it. Processes run away on FreeBSD? FreeBSD kills the process, lets the system keep working. Linux, lets the process consume all the resources and kill the system into a unresponsive mess. The reason it's still yet to be adopted by more than 10 people for the desktop is because there is no standard windowing environment better than Windows. You're far better off ditching the windowing environment and running everything from the command line that doesn't rely on KDE, Gnome, or whatever else. That's where Linux can shine... when nVidia, AMD and Intel play ball with the graphics drivers.
Re:Already happening - slowly (Score:3, Insightful)
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/ [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