Cumulus Linux 3.0 NOS now in the wild

Cumulus Linux is touting a bunch of heavyweights as supporting the latest iteration of its white-box Linux.

On board for the launch of the Cumulus Linux 3.0 network operating system are Dell, EdgeCore Networks, Mellanox, Penguin Computing, and Supermicro.

For Cumulus, one of the biggest aspects of the launch is that version 3.0 is 100 Gbps Ethernet-capable, something it reckons will be important for the data centre market.

Four of the products already certified in its hardware compatibility list target that space: Dell's Z9100, Penguin's 3200CP and Supermicro's SSE-C3632 (all using Broadcom Tomahawk silicon), and Mellanox's own-silicon SN2700.

For IPv4/IPv6 leaf-spine architectures, the latest cut of the code adds Linux Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) for multi-tenant environments; BGP Unnumbered and RFC 5549 improve v4/v6 dual-stack support; and there's BGP- and OSPF-based redistribute neighbour capabilities.

Cumulus Linux 3.0 is built on Debian 8 and the Linux 4.1 kernel, with an enhanced networking stack. Cumulus VX (the virtual machine) adds ONIE-supporting hardware emulation.

If you're feeling brave, there's also an experimental feature called Quagga Reload in the Quagga software routing suite: “It enables you to apply only the modifications you make to your Quagga configuration, synchronising its running state with the configuration in /etc/quagga/Quagga.conf. This is useful for optimising automation of Quagga in your environment or to apply changes made at runtime.”

The complete release notes are here. ®