DANOS is a full Network Operating System https://www.danosproject.org/ managed by the Linux Foundation so it is open source. AT&T is the main contributor and consumer of it so far. It evolved from Vyatta, the linux NOS that has been around and passed ownership through a couple companies since the early 2000s. It is using FRR for the routing control plane and the Danos CLI wraps it and the other software packages together (VPNs, DNS, DHCP, CGNAT, etc) into a single config file to manage. Support for the opensource version is very responsive via github, Atlassan issue tracker, and the Matrix chat room.

If you want a commercially supported version, you can go with Danos Vyatta Edition from IP Infusion. It uses IPI's routing engine control plane instead of FRR but is very similar.

On Fri, Oct 23, 2020 at 3:57 AM Jean St-Laurent via NANOG <nanog@nanog.org> wrote:

Hi Jared,

 

This project looks very interesting.

 

Can you share with us which software or package do you use in DANOS for routing? Is it a kind of command wrapper on top of FRR?

 

Also, it seems stable, but I am sure you already faced some minor or weird bugs. How is the support handle with DANOS? Is it community driven?

 

Thanks for sharing

 

Jean

 

From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+jean=ddostest.me@nanog.org> On Behalf Of Jared Geiger
Sent: Friday, October 23, 2020 12:30 AM
To: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
Subject: Re: Linux router network cards

 

I use DANOS with Intel XL710 10G NICs in DPDK mode for linux based routing.

 

If you're doing routing protocols, allocate 2 CPU cores to the control plane and then a CPU core per 10G/1G interface for the dataplane, plus an extra core for good measure. So for a 4 x 10G router taking in full routes, 2 cores for control plane, 5 cores for the dataplane. Those cores should be Intel Xeon E5-2600v3/4 or newer and faster the clocks, the better.

 

Similar CPU core allocations if you choose TNSR.

 

On Thu, Oct 22, 2020 at 3:21 PM Jean St-Laurent via NANOG <nanog@nanog.org> wrote:

Chelsio cards are probably what you are looking for.

https://www.chelsio.com/terminator-6-asic/

It's closer to an asic than a traditional nic as the router/firewall rules
are pushed directly into the hardware.

I don't know how good they are with linux and they seem to be compatible.
https://www.chelsio.com/linux/

You will need to mess around a bit and fiddle here and there. If you don't
mind using FreeBSD instead of linux, you could achieve a smoother and more
integrated experience.

Jean

-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG <nanog-bounces+jean=ddostest.me@nanog.org> On Behalf Of micah
anderson
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2020 5:31 PM
To: Philip Loenneker <Philip.Loenneker@tasmanet.com.au>; NANOG
<nanog@nanog.org>
Subject: RE: Linux router network cards


Thanks for the reply.

Philip Loenneker <Philip.Loenneker@tasmanet.com.au> writes:
> Take a look at the Mellanox ConnectX 5 series of cards. They handle
> DPDK, PVRDMA (basically SR-IOV that allows live migration between
> hosts), and can even process packets within the NIC for some

From what I can tell, SR-IOV/PVRDMA aren't really useful for me in building
a router that wont be doing any virtualization.

If the card can do DPDK, can it do XDP?

> The slidedeck for the presentation is here:
> https://www.ausnog.net/sites/default/files/ausnog-2019/presentations/1
> .9_Rhod_Brown_AusNOG2019.pdf
>
> It's heavily targeting virtualised workloads but some of the feature sets
apply to bare-metal uses too.

Yeah, this wont be a virtualized environment, just a router passing packets,
dropping them, handling bgp and collecting flows.

--
        micah