>This was also a problem I had with Cumulus. When I tore apart Cumulus, I figured out that it was less than a dozen unique tools and a distribution rebuilt for 32-bit MIPS and PowerPC.

Almost all of which are open source (or at least "source available"), with the exception of switchd, which cannot be open sourced because it links with proprietary asic sdk's. I don't see how having very few custom tools over a vanilla Linux distribution is a bad thing.

>It was pretty trivial to rebase to standard Fedora or Debian and get a better platform out of it.

If you enable upstream Debian apt sources in your sources.list then it effectively is standard Debian - plus switchd.

Of course it is entirely possible to take all of the components of Cumulus Linux and use them on a separate operating system - enter sonic, vyos, etc - so if you build out such a system which can also drive ASICs and that you prefer over Cumulus, you can take full advantage of all of Cumulus's open source contributions.

>What I would love to see is all these people who keep doing this crap working in the actual Linux distribution communities to build and integrate with upstream projects so that everyone downstream gets all kinds of flexibility

If I read you correctly, Cumulus works upstream as much as it can:

   ~/linux$ git log --author "cumulusnetworks.com" --oneline | wc -l
   773

   ~/ifupdown2$ git log --author "cumulusnetworks.com" --oneline | wc -l
   1265

   ~/frr$ git log --author "cumulusnetworks.com" --oneline | wc -l
   8107

I like to believe Cumulus is quite active in the communities of projects it uses. I feel I may have misunderstood your point, though.

>If we treated the network gear like weaker servers, instead of specialty equipment, there's so many more interesting things you can do!

I completely agree, that's the dream!

Disclaimer: I work at Cumulus

user:	turtlecrush1337
created:	May 26, 2020
karma:	2