THE Technical Conference on Linux Networking

Netdev 0.1

News atom feed icon

2014-12-20: Accepted Proposal - Scott Feldman - Rocker: switchdev prototyping vehicle

Rocker is an emulated network switch platform created to accelerate development of an in-kernel network switch driver model. Rocker has two parts: an Qemu emulation of a 62-port switch chip with PCI host interface and a Linux device driver. The goal is to emulate capabilities of contemporary network switch ASICs used in data-center/enterprise so the community can develop the device driver interfaces in the kernel. The initial capabilities targeted are L2 bridging function offload and L3 routing function offload. In both cases, the forwarding (data) plane is offloaded to the switch device but the control and management planes remain in Linux. Additional capabilities such as L2-over-L3 tunneling, L2 bonding, ACL support, and flow-based networking are planned or in-progress. This paper/talk will cover overview of Rocker, current status, and future work.