
Nvidia Acquires Cumulus - yankcrime
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2020/05/04/nvidia-acquires-cumulus/
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eqvinox
Cumulus is a great complement to their earlier Mellanox acquisition. I'm
hoping for good things to come from this.

... that is, if nVidia doesn't force their bad open source habits down on
either of these 2 companies. But there is no indication they will.

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dogma1138
Cumulus Linux isn’t free software, if anything this might increase the chances
of them releasing public version of this.

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carlhjerpe
Everything in the Cumulus distribution except switchd is opensource (According
to sales people anyways, and seems true so far, been browsing some python
source on our switches), switchd is using information in the Linux kernel to
program/configure Broadcom and Mellanox ASICs. Their contributions to the
Linux kernel and the FRR routing package is not insignificant.

I hope Nvidia is going to keep allowing Cumulus to support Broadcom ASICs and
keep upstreaming their development efforts.

Disclamier: The company is work for is a small but happy Cumulus customer.

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kijiki
Cumulus co-founder and original switchd author here.

Mellanox sells switches with Broadcom silicon, so certainly in the short and
medium term there will be no changes there. Long term is harder to say. It is
possible that once Mellanox/Nvidia's ASIC portfolio is sufficiently complete
they'll stop adding support for newer competitor ASICs, but I have no special
insight there.

Thanks for using Cumulus, glad to hear you're having a good experience with
it!

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carlhjerpe
May i ask about your thoughts regarding switchd now that Mellanox has been
pushing Switchdev quite hard and Broadcom SAI (and i guess SAI could be
"plugged" into the kernel just as switchd with some "glue" (netlink) so we
don't have to modify userspace?).

It seems like the actual "programming ASIC" importance at least for Mellanox
Spectrums is less of a USP by every new kernel release, i still see value in
the support, packaging and sponsoring development though.

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kijiki
switchd living in userspace was in large part a result of the highly
proprietary NDA's ASIC SDKs. Mellanox is making small (and welcome) steps in
opening up by putting some functionality into their switchdev driver, but if
you want a full feature set in 2020, you need their userspace SDK, which means
switchd.

SAI, like OFDPA and OpenNSL before them (and a few more, can't even keep track
anymore) are giant closed-source userspace binary blobs that Broadcom released
to try (and fail) to mollify folks who want open-source networking. If you're
serious about feature set and performance, there is unfortunately still no
alternative to the proprietary NDA'd SDKs.

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Cixelyn
Now that nvidia owns a full switch OS, I wonder if this means that Onix, which
they inherited from their Mellanox acquisition, will eventually be phased out.

We’ve been running Onix just because it’s cheaper than Cumulus (read: no
yearly contract).

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wmf
This definitely looks like throwing in the towel on Onyx. Cumulus was always
more mature and it was going to take a lot of investment to catch up.

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myrandomcomment
The question is will they still support Cumulus on non Mellanox ODM switches
which 99% of use an ASICs from Mellanox's competitor Broadcom?

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1-6
The blog needs to make text black. It's hard to read without highlighting
text.

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LargoLasskhyfv
Not when you have Javascript blocked by default, using some adblocker. Try the
difference!

