switchd 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

switchd 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.