4 ms·
Cumulus co-founder and original switchd author here. Mellanox sells switches with Broadcom silicon, so certainly in the short and medium term there will be no
by kijiki 6y ago
Cumulus co-founder and original switchd author here.
Mellanox sells switches with Broadcom silicon, so certainly in the short and medium term there will be no changes there. Long term is harder to say. It is possible that once Mellanox/Nvidia's ASIC portfolio is sufficiently complete they'll stop adding support for newer competitor ASICs, but I have no special insight there.
Thanks for using Cumulus, glad to hear you're having a good experience with it!
- carlhjerpe 6y agoMay i ask about your thoughts regarding switchd now that Mellanox has been pushing Switchdev quite hard and Broadcom SAI (and i guess SAI could be "plugged" into the kernel just as switchd with some "glue" (netlink) so we don't have to modify userspace?). It seems like the actual "programming ASIC" importance at least for Mellanox Spectrums is less of a USP by every new kernel release, i still see value in the support, packaging and sponsoring development though.
- kijiki 6y agoswitchd living in userspace was in large part a result of the highly proprietary NDA's ASIC SDKs. Mellanox is making small (and welcome) steps in opening up by putting some functionality into their switchdev driver, but if you want a full feature set in 2020, you need their userspace SDK, which means switchd. SAI, like OFDPA and OpenNSL before them (and a few more, can't even keep track anymore) are giant closed-source userspace binary blobs that Broadcom released to try (and fail) to mollify folks who want open-source networking. If you're serious about feature set and performance, there is unfortunately still no alternative to the proprietary NDA'd SDKs.
- dogma1138 6y agoAny plans of a community/free or a SOHO edition?