The DentOS 2.0 network operating system is available, based on the Linux kernel and designed to equip switches, routers and specialized network equipment. The development is carried out with the participation of Amazon, Delta Electronics, Marvell, NVIDIA, Edgecore Networks and Wistron NeWeb (WNC). Initially, the project was founded by Amazon to equip network equipment in its infrastructure. The DentOS code is written in C and distributed under the Eclipse Public License.
To manage packet switching in DentOS, the SwitchDev Linux kernel subsystem is used, which allows you to create drivers for Ethernet switches that can delegate frame forwarding and network packet processing to specialized hardware chips. The software stuffing is based on the standard Linux network stack, the NetLink subsystem and tools such as IPRoute2, tc (Traffic Control), brctl (Bridge Control) and FRRouting, as well as VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol), LLDP (Link Layer Discovery Protocol) protocols and MSTP (Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol).
The system environment is based on the ONL (Open Network Linux) distribution, which in turn uses the Debian GNU/Linux package base and provides an installer, settings, and drivers to run on switches. ONL is developed by the Open Compute project and is a platform for creating specialized network devices that supports installation on more than one hundred different switch models. The package includes drivers for interaction with indicators used in switches, temperature sensors, coolers, I2C buses, GPIOs and SFP transceivers. For management, you can use the IpRoute2 and ifupdown2 tools, as well as gNMI (gRPC Network Management Interface). YANG (Yet Another Next Generation, RFC-6020) data models are used to define the 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 resource management based on ACL. Added support for flags to recognize local (intranet) 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