The list of possible topics for the current academic year are the following (more can be added if needed):
Many hyperscalers now adopt "white box" switches in their datacenters, namely "no-well-known-name" switches powered by merchant silicon (e.g., Marvell, Broadcom, Intel), which appear to be competitive compared to the ones provider by traditional network manufactures (e.g., Cisco, Huawei, etc.). However, the "hardware" switch must be associated with an operating system: here, SONiC (driven by Microsoft) is becoming a solid alternative with a large number of supported switches.
This project aims at familiarizing with a SONiC-supported switch, the Edgecore DCS204 (formely AS7726-32X), (1) installing the operating system, (2) testing the most common configurations (e.g., bridging, routing, VLANs), (3) understanding the level of programmability (e.g., turning on/off and configuring features through a software API instead of the command line) and (4) analyzing the level of integration with the Linux kernel, in terms of offloaded functions (e.g., routing/bridging configured with vanilla Linux command, while running on the hardware; packet capture with tcpdump, etc.), and in particular with respect to the eBPF subsystem.
Student: XXX; tutor: Davide Miola, Fulvio Risso