Facebook Open Switching System (“FBOSS”) and Wedge in the open

This post announces the initial release of the Facebook Open Switching System (FBOSS) project on GitHub and the proposed contribution of the Wedge top-of-rack switch specification to the OCP networking project. It details the anatomy of a network switch, explaining the role of ASICs and the FBOSS agent in programming them. FBOSS is presented as a set of applications on Linux, not a full OS, categorized into low-level, automation, and control apps. The FBOSS agent's lean feature set, focused on L3 unicast routing with ECMP and BGP, is highlighted. The post also discusses the challenges of open-source switching software due to proprietary ASIC SDKs and the role of Broadcom's OpenNSL APIs in enabling the open-sourcing of the FBOSS agent.