Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tw04 2219 days ago
Cisco is already Linux based. IOS-XE and NX-OS.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_IOS_XE

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_NX-OS

3 comments

If you want to enjoy even more pain, ah trivia I mean, NXOS and NXOS are not the same thing. Read it again. There is an NXOS train for the original 2/5/7K and current kit in that line, and there is another version for the 3/9K new kit from the ACI spin in. They are just different enough that it makes things difficult when you are trying to develop tools for them. Cisco has promised to merge the two for a long time now.
IOS-XE is essentially IOS Classic running as an application on top of Linux, communicating with the actual forwarding hardware. NX-OS is similar but without legacy of having been a standalone OS. Linux generally stays away from all networking work and just provides a nicer deployment target with nicer APIs than bare bones MIPS/PPC/x86
IOS-XR is also Linux-based.
IOS-XR at least used to be QNX based, with somewhat distributed architecture (line cards running separate OS instances etc.)
Yes, the QNX version (cXR) is approaching end-of-life afaik. The distributed architecture remains with the Linux version (eXR).
TIL. Thanks a lot :) is eXR used for the XRv?