[kijiki]

None of the current forwarding ASIC vendors publish enough information to write a driver for their chips. So no, you can't write your own driver. The reason OpenSwitch's OpenNSL binary is binary-only is because it uses Broadcom's proprietary SDK, and programs registers that are only available under Broadcom's NDA.

If you're just going to run it in a VM, you'd be better off with more established things like OpenBSD, OpenWRT, pfSense, Cumulus VX, or even just a Debian VM with Quagga.

<disclosure>I'm CTO of Cumulus, whose network OS is exactly as open-source as OpenSwitch: everything but the single user-space program that links to Broadcom's SDK.</disclosure>

[dingo_bat]

>None of the current forwarding ASIC vendors publish enough information to write a driver for their chips. So no, you can't write your own driver.

Of course they don't publish it as open source. But if you buy their chips, they will, I assume. So then you can write your own driver.

>If you're just going to run it in a VM, you'd be better off with more established things like OpenBSD, OpenWRT, pfSense, Cumulus VX, or even just a Debian VM with Quagga.

I agree. My VM scenario was meant only to illustrate that OpenSwitch is really easy to run in a container/VM, and that fact can be used to examine it for any malovalent behavior.