We're at the beginning of a revolution in the networking industry. For the first time, you can buy a whitebox network switch with modern ASICs (think 48-10G ports + 6-40G ports), and an operating system, separately. At Cumulus, the OS choice is Linux. Working with several switch ODMs we've ported our Debian-based distro to about 25 whitebox switch platforms. Through that process we've developed an understanding of common switch hardware designs and what it takes to make those systems, despite their platform differences, act like a standard Linux box. We believe the next step is to define a way to encode those platform differences into firmware using ACPI. This talk will focus on the work we've done at Cumulus, including a proposed patch set, to describe switch-specific platform details using ACPI.
