[dev] Open Network Equipment and FRRouting

[Andrew Lunn]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2019 at 01:54:48PM +0000, Łukasz Wójcik via dev wrote:
> Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2019 14:17:45 +0100
> From: Łukasz Wójcik <lukasz.wojcik at zoho.com>
> To: dev at lists.frrouting.org
> Subject: Open Network Equipment and FRRouting
> 
> Hello there,
> 
> 
> In the era of Open Networking equipment, e.g. switching ASICs support
> forwarding based on L3 information. I was wondering,
> if FRRouting supports or plans to support any mechanisms that would
> allow for passing L3 data to the hardware, and therefore
> offloading some work to the HW ? I would imagine some kind of API or
> event-driven mechanisms that would require HW manufacturer's

Hi Łukasz

There are multiple ways to do this. The simplest is to just use the
kernel APIs as they are for adding/removing routes. The kernel already
has all the internal plumbing to pass the information down into the
switch driver, and offload it to the hardware. FFR just works.

The problem is, few of the Open Networking equipment are actually
open. They have a big binary blob SDK running in user space, not an
open source driver in the kernel.

     Andrew