SONiC – An Open Source Network Operating System
So my problem with SONiC, Cumulus, and all these other &quot;network operating system&quot; Linux platforms is that they all seem to be designed to be fiefdoms and tend to be really stale. In my view, they bring almost nothing of value to the table.<p>Let&#x27;s talk a bit more about SONiC...<p>For one, SONiC literally lists that pull requests that aren&#x27;t already planned and approved will not be accepted[1]. This defeats a good chunk of the value of having a community project. People will want to contribute and extend your platform in ways you never thought of, and they&#x27;ll do it in a completely decentralized fashion.<p>Another issue I see is that SONiC literally holds back everything to an old Linux kernel and ships random BSP blobs that are unvetted. This is a nasty combination for anyone who wants to consider their NOS trusted or secure. They&#x27;re on a 4.9.x kernel, and while that is still maintained, it is far from the best option if you want to take advantage of innovation in Linux networking.<p>I&#x27;m also generally confused on why this whole project isn&#x27;t just &quot;let&#x27;s get the networking tools and hardware support stuff into standard Linux distributions and leverage their tooling and communities&quot;. This was also a problem I had with Cumulus. When I tore apart Cumulus, I figured out that it was less than a dozen unique tools and a distribution rebuilt for 32-bit MIPS and PowerPC. It was pretty trivial to rebase to standard Fedora or Debian and get a better platform out of it.<p>And finally, I don&#x27;t really think this provides any real innovation. It&#x27;s not really different from Cumulus, Open Network Linux, and others. And ONL actually is using more up to date kernels (5.4.x as of right now!) and offers better networking tools!<p>What I would <i>love</i> to see is all these people who keep doing this crap working in the actual Linux distribution communities to build and integrate with upstream projects so that everyone downstream gets all kinds of flexibility.<p>Imagine if you had a flavor of Fedora CoreOS for your network gear! The immutable OS, updated with RPM-OSTree, fresh software stack, and broad hardware support, all in one neat package.<p>If we treated the network gear like weaker servers, instead of specialty equipment, there&#x27;s so many more interesting things you can do!<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;SONiC&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sonic-Roadmap-Planning" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;SONiC&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sonic-Roadmap-Planning</a>