[c-nsp] Cat6500 modular IOS - direction?

[Gert Doering]

Hi,

On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 11:59:53PM +0200, Asbjorn Hojmark - Lists wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Aug 2010 22:50:21 +0200, you wrote:
> 
> > If I were a competitor, my worst nightmare might be "Cisco gets their
> > operating system act together, and delivers a stable, modular, cross-
> > platform OS *for all their existing product lines*".
> 
> CRS-3 and Cisco 500 routers, Nexus 7000 and SFE 1000P switches, and a
> UCS-B blade system all running the same code. No thank you, 

Well, sorry.  I forgot that Cisco entered the grocery business recently.

Leave out the crap switches, the linksys product line, etc. - and for
the rest, yes, a common OS with full software modularity would be very
much appreciated.

> I do not
> want to be waiting for a new feature release with PIC Edge, which is
> delayed because of a bug in the UPnP or USB printer code.

Useful software modularity (which is not what ION had) could bring this.

Bunding software development and bugfixing resources could also bring
us 5 times the amount of developers working on the common OS, instead
of small teams not having enough resources for 5 different OSes.

> You'll quickly see that Cisco's vast range of products can be and has
> to be grouped in several 'similar products that need the same category
> of features' (and hence OS's)... and it looks to me that's actually
> exactly what Cisco is working on.
> 
>  Core  : IOS XR
>  Edge  : IOS XE
>  Access: IOS (classic)
>  DC    : NX-OS

I don't really think that's a useful approach.  Why would the Sup2T run
IOS XE, and the Nexus run NX-OS?  It's basically "big and nice switches",
even based on the same ASIC architecture - so this very much looks like
a waste of resources for me.  I'd just kill IOS (classic) and IOS XE
and focus on XR and NX-OS - modern OSes with a sane architecture.

Now, looking at OpenWRT, which runs a full-featured operating system with
full memory protection, restartable processes, working SSH (with keys!),
etc., in 8 M flash and 16 M RAM, I sometimes really wonder where the
OS development journey inside Cisco is heading to...

gert
-- 
USENET is *not* the non-clickable part of WWW!
                                                           //www.muc.de/~gert/
Gert Doering - Munich, Germany                             gert at greenie.muc.de
fax: +49-89-35655025                        gert at net.informatik.tu-muenchen.de
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