[dahfizz]

A switch operating system doesn't do the actual networking stuff, all that happens in the switching ASIC. All the OS does is apply configurations and basic management tasks.

If it runs on a $10 raspberry pi it will run fine on a $20,000 switch.

[Cyph0n]

Well, that's not really the case with higher-scale router operating systems like IOS-XR. You have a ton of protocols running in software, so performance and memory requirements increase quite a bit.

And then there are the high-availability (HA) requirements which typically lead to redundancy in software and hardware.

[turtlecrush1337]

Quite right. Control plane traffic is punted to the CPU, and a Raspi CPU cannot really handle that volume of traffic at enterprise scale.