The Linux kernel has been doing network hardware offloads and acceleration for decades (Nics, smart-nics, wireless AP’s and many other places). Because of this, the kernel has had the infrastructure and the right abstractions to recognize and register a networking hardware device since the early days. And this infrastructure has matured over time. Today Linux enablement is the best way to get faster adoption of your hardware. And also possibly the fastest way to go-to-market. In this talk we look at Open switch hardware's journey into the Linux kernel, ecosystem and community. We will show how embracing Linux for your open switch hardware can simplify and unify your networking infrastructure. Linux kernel has abstractions for supporting switch hardware. We will talk about the support for switch hardware in the Linux kernel and walk through many cases of collaborative development in the Linux community that made this possible. In the recent years the Linux kernel has also received many networking updates to make it a first class network operating system for a data center switch hardware. These include VRF, MPLS, VxLAN, E-VPN and many others. We will cover details on these updates. Today one can build a open E-VPN data center fabric with open switch hardware, Linux kernel and other open software from the Linux ecosystem. How cool is that ?. Running native Linux allows you to now also extend the same E-VPN fabric to servers or hypervisors. We will show how benefits of unifying your networking infrastructure with open hardware and Linux are endless: your provisioning and operational tools are developed and maintained for the same operating system and come from the same Linux ecosystem. We will conclude with a few details on the next big things coming in the Linux kernel and community to support the next generation switch hardware!
