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Re: Comparison of freeware open source switch software?


From: "Ricky Beam" <jfbeam () gmail com>
Date: Tue, 09 Jan 2018 18:09:49 -0500

On Tue, 09 Jan 2018 02:17:59 -0500, Hank Nussbacher <hank () efes iucc ac il> wrote:
so to clarify I am interested only in bare-metal or whitebox swicthes
and freeware, open source software.

It's my understanding that there simply is no such thing. Because none of the HARDWARE has open source code. Sure, anyone can write software to spirit packets between NICs (linux and *BSD has had that capability for decades.) But doing that "at scale" with the various manufacturers SoCs requires vendor specific code to setup and control the chip. The broadcom "NDK" is just a shim on top of a pre-compiled proprietary SDK blob.

--Ricky


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