[dev] Open Network Equipment and FRRouting

Łukasz Wójcik lukasz.wojcik at zoho.com
Mon Jan 21 14:08:06 EST 2019


Hello Andrew,


Indeed, I am aware of how netlink works, I was just hoping that there
will be some kind of unified API, same for pretty much every ASIC.

In any case, there's also ORC in ONL. As I understand it, it provides
it's own virtual interfaces attached to actual switch ports. Any change
to this

interface (or routes related to these) would be translated to ASIC. This
approach seems very nice, as you could simply use these virtual interfaces,

as you would with physical interfaces, and therefore you would not need
any changes in FRR. The problem I see is that I cannot find any
documentation.

All info I've found is few mailing list posts + mention on ONL's website.


Thank you,

-ŁW

On 21-Jan-19 19:57, Andrew Lunn wrote:
> 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
>





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