CLUG Talk: Running Debian on a 100Gbps router
Last night I attended the first local Linux User Group talk since before the pandemic (possibly even… long before the pandemic!)
Topic: How and why Atomic Access runs Debian on a 100Gbps router
Speaker: Joe Botha
This is the first time CLUG used Woodstock Brewery as a venue. It’s great, because now we can have snacks and beer during the talks :)
Joe has worked in the internet space for quite some time, and co-founded companies like Teraco, Frogfoot, Amobia, Octotel and Atomic Access. Through all of these he’s done interesting and noteworthy work, which I’ve only seen some glimpses of before in the few moments we’ve interacted at CLUG events.
It was nice seeing a lot more detail of a project that I wouldn’t even know about if he didn’t give this talk. It doesn’t seem that anyone else is running Debian on big switches for commercial ISPs. He goes through these great lengths to run Debian so that he can have a decent set of tools and familiar commands on the switch, as apposed to the (my word here) crappy tooling that you would get on the brand name switches.
By total coincidence, David Plonka happened to be at the brewery too, he’s a network expert who works at Akamai. He didn’t know this talk was taking place, so this was a fun happenstance, he had some good inputs during the talk too. He also bought everyone a round of beer, thanks David!
I asked Joe for his slides and I’ll share them here when I get them. Unfortunately we don’t have video for this talk, but I asked Joe to consider coming to DebConf23, I think this topic would be really interesting to the wider Debian crowd. By the way, both registration and the call for proposals are now officially open for DebConf23, it’s taking place in September in Kochi, India this year.
Updates (2023-06-07):
Joe provided slides for his talk, you can get them here.
He also provided some links:
- Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfgjbHivdQ8 “Building a Better NOS with Linux and switchdev”
- Switchdev wiki: https://github.com/Mellanox/mlxsw/wiki
- Switchdev repository: https://github.com/Marvell-switching/switchdev-prestera
