Powering Data Center Networks with Debian

This talk focuses on a journey to build a Debian-based network operating system distribution for data center networking hardware. While Linux networking has been deployed and accelerated by hardware on servers, hypervisors and network processors for decades, data center networking hardware has run on closed operating systems and software since the very first computer networks were created. By riding a new wave of open networking hardware, Linux has been gaining a lot of new ground in data center networks. Network hardware and software disaggregation has opened the doors to leverage and extend existing Linux platforms and ecosystems to new data center networking features. In this talk I will show how Linux networking can be accelerated with an open networking hardware switch. A greater part of this journey has been to make a Linux network operating system distribution synonymous to a server operating system distribution. The examples in the talk are from Cumulus Linux, a Debian derivative.

This talk will cover:

• A brief overview of open hardware and ONIE, the Open Networking Install Environment
• Hardware networking features
• The latest in Linux kernel networking and hardware offloaded to network switches
• The latest in the Linux networking user-space and ecosystem

• Video