Could come down in part to device driver support: Microsoft's post revealing ACS says a fair bit about its features but doesn't explain why Microsoft felt deci

Could come down in part to device driver support: Microsoft's post revealing ACS says a fair bit about its features but doesn't explain why Microsoft felt decided to do with Linux distro? Perhaps the complexity of the world's switching ecosystem was the reason: Redmond says it has demonstrated ACS across with “four ASIC vendors (Mellanox, Broadcom, Cavium, and the Barefoot software switch), six implementations of SAI (Broadcom, Dell, Mellanox, Cavium, Barefoot, and Metaswitch).... Per an Azure blog posting yesterday (http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/switch-abstraction-interface-sai-officially-accepted-by-the-open-compute-project-ocp/ http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/switch-abstraction-int...): "As of July 2015, the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI) specification has been officially accepted by the Open Compute Project (OCP) as a standardized C API to program ASICs." To my very limited understanding of this space, FPGAs and cheaper application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are essential to high speed networking.