DentOS 2.0, a kernel-based network operating system, is now available Linux and is designed to equip switches, routers, and specialized networking equipment. Development is being conducted with the participation of Amazon, Delta Electronics, Marvell, NVIDIA, Edgecore Networks, and Wistron NeWeb (WNC). The project was originally founded by Amazon to equip networking equipment in its infrastructure. DentOS is written in C and distributed under the Eclipse Public License.
DentOS uses a kernel subsystem to manage packet switching. Linux SwitchDev, which allows you to create drivers for Ethernet switches that delegate frame forwarding and network packet processing to specialized hardware chips. The software is based on the standard network stack. Linux, the NetLink subsystem and tools such as IPRoute2, tc (Traffic Control), brctl (Bridge Control) and FRRouting, as well as the VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol), LLDP (Link Layer Discovery Protocol) and MSTP (Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol) protocols.
The system environment is based on the ONL (Open Network) distribution Linux), which in turn uses a package base Debian GNU/Linux and provides an installer, configuration, and drivers for deployment on switches. ONL is developed by the Open Compute project and is a platform for creating specialized network devices, supporting installation on over 100 different switch models. It includes drivers for interacting with switches' indicators, temperature sensors, fans, I2C buses, GPIOs, and SFP transceivers. Management can be achieved using the IpRoute2 and ifupdown2 tools, as well as gNMI (gRPC Network Management Interface). YANG (Yet Another Next Generation, RFC-6020) data models are used for configuration.
The system is available for switches based on Marvell and Mellanox ASICs with up to 48 10-gigabit ports. It supports various ASICs and network processing chips, including Mellanox Spectrum, Marvell Aldrin 2 and Marvell AC3X ASICs with implementation of hardware packet forwarding tables. Ready-to-install DentOS images are prepared for ARM64 (257 MB) and AMD64 (523 MB) architectures.
The new release adds the following improvements:
- Support for NAT-44 and NA(P)T for address translation (NAT) from the internal range to public addresses at the level of ordinary (Layer-3, network layer) and VLAN ports (network bridges) in the switch.
- Provides options for configuring 802.1Q network interfaces (VLANs) and routing traffic through them. The IpRoute2 and Ifupdown2 packages are used for configuration.
- Added support for PoE (Power over Ethernet) controllers for power management over Ethernet.
- Changes have been made to improve the performance and scalability of firewall configurations.
- Improved ACL-based resource management. Added support for flags to recognize local (intranet) resources. IP addresses.
- Provided the ability to connect custom handlers to configure port isolation.
- Based on "devlink", an API for getting information and changing device parameters, support for counters of local traps and dropped packets is implemented.
Source: opennet.ru
