All vendors should be writing in depth architecture books. The Juniper MX book is a great example. Tell us exactly what your product can do and we'll likely use more of it

Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2012 20:01:58 -0400 Subject: Re: IOS architecture From: david@davidswafford.com To: khomyakov.andrey@gmail.com CC: nanog@nanog.org

I too have been wondering if this would ever get revived..... the only book on NX-OS software is so basic too :-(

David.

On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 7:12 PM, Andrey Khomyakov <khomyakov.andrey@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Does anyone know if there is an updated version of this book? Year 2000 seems so distant now...

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0051TM4RC/ref=rdr_kindle_ext_tmb

--Andrey

On 29 October 2012 12:43, <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu> wrote:

On Sat, 27 Oct 2012 11:16:10 +0100, "Darren O'Connor" said:

...

All vendors should be writing in depth architecture books. The Juniper MX book is a great example. Tell us exactly what your product can do and we'll likely use more of it

On the flip side, if you document what your product is probably incapable of due to the design architecture, the salescritters won't be able to sell as many of them... :)

I think the biggest problem in that regard is the gap between what the switch or router architecture is capable of and what the current release of IOS actually supports. This is generally what appears on the "roadmap" but, historically, not all of it gets delivered in a timely manner, and some features aren't delivered at all before the hardware is superseded. Aled

On Oct 27, 2012, at 11:00 PM, Pete Lumbis <alumbis@gmail.com> wrote:

You might want to take a look at the CEF book, which expands on this http://www.amazon.com/Cisco-Express-Forwarding-ebook/dp/B0015V9DQU/

both of these are still very accurate on how IOS operates today. The only major changes with IOS-XE is that IOS is now a process and packet forwarding is handled in hardware instead of software.

On the IOS-XE it's no longer single process, when you're running in the modular version. It's getting complicated.

For NX-OS and IOS-XR the software/operating system is wildly different and I think there is a definite gap in literature out there.

For now, there's Cisco Live and techtorials about architecture and inner works. There will be a book, or two :) -- "There's no sense in being precise when | Łukasz Bromirski you don't know what you're talking | jid:lbromirski@jabber.org about." John von Neumann | http://lukasz.bromirski.net

A couple of thoughts: 1. The IOS specific parts of both Inside Cisco IOS Software Architecture are still pretty relevant. The RIB is now a separate process, and there are other changes, but the software architecture (of IOS specifically!) is pretty close to what's there. 2. The hardware architecture isn't current, but, IMHO, those sections are still "useful," for understanding the general way routers are laid out in terms of driver to ASIC interaction, packet receive processing, and things like that. 3. I've been talking to folks in Cisco to encourage them to write a new version. I'm busy on another project (The Art of Network Architecture), and have a couple of other ideas backed up in my mind to work on, and don't have access to the code or hardware architecture folks any longer, so it would be difficult for me. I would be glad to help anyone in cisco who wants to pull such a book together in any way I can, but I'm just not in a position to actually write an updated version of this pair of books. HTH Russ -- <>< riwhite@verisign.com russw@riw.us