So we gave it a new one, and I am genuinely excited about where it is: real Linux, running as the network operating system, driving the Broadcom switching chip directly. We call it EdgeNOS.
There was no shortcut. Broadcom puts out a dev kit, OpenMDK — source-available, not open-source — and we used it, but it is a skeleton. It attaches to the chip and does the basics; everything that actually moves a packet in hardware we rebuilt by hand, reading register and table dumps off a known-good install on the same silicon and reconstructing that state from scratch. Weeks of it.
Here is what is working now, and why I keep grinning at the terminal:
The optics. Getting light onto fiber is deceptively brutal — the chip’s SerDes, the retimers, and the optic itself all have to be right, and every one of them fails the same way: “no link.” Both speeds are up. 10G SFP+ links to a Cisco Nexus at zero packet loss, and 40G QSFP is forwarding too.
Hardware forwarding. The switch routes IPv4 entirely in silicon. The chip forwards the packets; the CPU never touches them.
ECMP. Dual uplinks to the Nexus, one prefix, two next-hops, and edged mirrors the Linux routing table straight into the chip. Traffic load-balances across both links — in hardware, not software.
A switch the industry wrote off is running an open OS we built ourselves, moving real traffic on its own optics and balancing it across uplinks. Routing protocols are next.
More soon.