That's why we have Juniper Router in the market.
I guess somebody who wants to use *BSD kernel for baseline of Router
Operating system moves to setup new company, and it became Juniper.
Juniper JuNOS uses FreeBSD as kernel.
Hyun
C. Jon Larsen wrote:
On Sat, 30 Jul 2005, Jim McBurnett wrote:
If I remember correctly, This Exactly where Cisco has said they are
going...
With the IOS XR Just as the beginning..
Does anyone else remember this?
On a different, older tangent ... coming from my possibly (probably)
flawed memories:
A looong time ago ... back in 1996-97 or so ...
A cisco rep promised a smallish VAR I onced worked for that a new code
base was being developed alongside 11.x and that it would likely
become the Next Generation IOS someday if it "worked out".
It was supposed to be a complete ground up re-write in an OO language
and it would have the ability to link new modules or shared objects in
at run time, and it would unify the existing router (25xx / 4[57]xx /
75xx) family with the Grand Junction acquisition - the CAT5K switch
family into one code tree and one IOS to run them all.
Instead we saw a flurry of new hardware (26xx, 16xx, 72xx, 36xx) which
seemed to be a little more buggy than the older hardware
especially when comparing the early 26xx and 36xx releases to the
4[57]xx routers.
I remember having some strange issues with early 26xx routers - like
the t1 wics wedging, the ip route cache getting corrupt, and 36xx
routers refusing to recognize NMs when you swapped them into new slots
or added new NMs. I always wondered exactly what those routers were
running - was it some of the "NG" code backported or just normal bugs
you expect when you are using all new chips, flash, and cpus (probably
the latter) ?
Anyway, I asked the cisco rep why they didn't just port *bsd or linux
and use that and he said there were some "smart people that had
already considered that and ruled it out as a bad idea."
Wonder if cisco regrets this (I dont have any idea, I'm just wondering
aloud). Would cisco have been smarter to already be running, say
OpenBSD as its kernel and then its IOS services as daemons ? Might
have opened up licensing problems for them that would have been a huge
headache too.
Is cisco the only major router/switch vendor running a home grown
(i.e. not commercial rtos or *bsd / linux based derivative) for its
core OS ?
Do folks that control purchasing decisions care whether their selected
vendors use a general purpose or proprietary OS when they are
evaluating products ?
I know that personally I dont like to buy gear that uses Microsoft
win2(x) or winCE as its host (whether its a pbx, firewall, router -
remember MS Steelhead?, etc). But thats just me ... Do people stop to
think about what is really inside their router or network appliance
when they buy it or do they only care what the *printed* manual says
can be done with their shiny new box ?
(Dislaimer - I like cisco gear a *lot* and I guess I am one that
always considered IOS pretty secure though I do always put interface
and vty acls for limiting access to the control plane when permitted
by the end customer).
-jon