[j-nsp] EX3200/4200 software | Requesting Clarification

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 02:31:43PM -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Bill Blackford <BBlackford at nwresd.k12.or.us> said:
> > <rant>
> > My other concern is that I seriously hope that Juniper isn't going down the path that Cisco chose to support an endless serious of code forks and thusly creating a Winchester House labyrinth of JUNOS choices.
> > </rant>
> 
> Well, there's already the rapid proliferation of JUNOS images for
> different hardware.  One image hits all the hardware routers (M/T), but
> then there's the software routers (J), three different images for EX
> switches, and three different images for SRX.

That's actually a bad way to look at it, since JUNOS has both a lot more
common elements and a lot more unique elements than the tarball
packaging scheme would lead you to believe.

For example, more than half the size of your "single image" M/T tarball
is actually just a big bundle of completely unique pfe-specific code
that can and frequently does develop platform specific bugs and issues:

# tar zxvf jpfe-9.5-20090529.0.tgz
...
x jpfe-common-9.5-20090529.0.tgz
x jpfe-M160-9.5-20090529.0.tgz
x jpfe-M40-9.5-20090529.0.tgz
x jpfe-M10-9.5-20090529.0.tgz
x jpfe-M7i-9.5-20090529.0.tgz
x jpfe-T-9.5-20090529.0.tgz
x jpfe-M320-9.5-20090529.0.tgz
x jpfe-M120-9.5-20090529.0.tgz
x jpfe-X960-9.5-20090529.0.tgz

On the other hand, the code for things like routing protocols or cli 
commands may be exactly the same for a T640 or a EX3200, the only reason 
they're stuffed into two different install images is that one is 
compiled for i386 and the other is compiled for PowerPC.

At the end of the day, they've both already branched many different
images and simply hidden it from you with an ever-increasing jinstall
size, and retained a lot of core software elements which are the same
across all platforms regardless of which file you downloaded. Isn't
complexity fun.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)