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Re: Debian derivatives census: Cumulus Linux: welcome!



On 07/09/2014 09:49 PM, Paul Wise wrote:
I would like to welcome yourself and Cumulus Linux to the Debian
derivatives census! Would you like to take this opportunity to introduce
yourself and Cumulus Linux to us all?

Thanks for the warm welcome!

I'm one of the founders of Cumulus Networks, and a long time Debian user (since 1999).

We make a distro we call Cumulus Linux, which runs on network switches. You can see the switches that we currently run on here:
http://cumulusnetworks.com/support/linux-hardware-compatibility-list/

We contribute to many open source projects, most notably, we're very heavy contributors to Quagga, a GPL routing protocol suite. We've written a replacement for ifupdown that we'll be presenting at debconf with the hopes of getting it included in a future Debian release. We released our installation environment for switches (called ONIE) via the Open Compute Project:
http://onie.org/

Unlike traditional proprietary switch OSes, we expose the existing networking functionality in the Linux kernel. The packet forwarding is done via a specialized ASIC, for example, a Broadcom Trident II can forward 1.28Terabits/sec in a 1U switch. An easy way to think about it is that we hardware accelerate the Linux kernel's forwarding functionality.

The cool part is that pretty much any software that runs on Debian works out of the box, so you're not limited to what we shipped. This is very different from a cisco or juniper switch, where only fixed functionality is exposed using a proprietary CLI. We've seen people run DHCPD, PXE servers, openstack controllers, ceph monitors and more on their Top of Rack switches.

You don't appear to be subscribed to the Cumulus Linux census page, I've
made a few changes:

http://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Census/CumulusLinux?action=info

Subscribed, thanks.

The apt repository for Cumulus Linux does not contain any source
packages, including for packages licensed under the GNU GPL. This may or
may not be a copyright violation depending on whether our not you
distribute those elsewhere. In any case, please add source packages to
your repository so that Debian can automatically create patches to be
presented to Debian package maintainers.

https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/CensusQA#No_source_packages
https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Integration#Patches

Everything is available at oss.cumulusnetworks.com as patches or packages. Adding a proper source repo is being worked on now, to make this more convenient.

The page says that Cumulus Linux modifies Debian binary packages. It is
quite rare that distributions modify Debian binary packages. Does
Cumulus Linux actually do this? If so could you describe what kind of
modifications you are making? If not I guess the page needs to be fixed.

We remove some files from the binary packages to reduce size. We're moving to building all packages ourselves, so this is not a long term thing.

The page is missing a dpkg vendor field. It is important that Debian
derivatives set this properly on installed systems and mention the value
of the field in the derivatives census.

https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Guidelines#Vendor

OK, we'll fix that.  Thanks for pointing it out.


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