DENT 2.0 released

[Posted March 8, 2022 by corbet]

DENT is a special-purpose Linux distribution aimed at router deployments; "DENT utilizes the Linux Kernel, Switchdev, and other Linux based projects as the basis for building a new standardized network operating system without abstractions or overhead". Version 2.0 has been released:

DENT 2.0 adds secure scaling with Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and Network Address Translation (NAT) to support a broader community of enterprise customers. It also adds Power over Ethernet (PoE) control to allow remote switching, monitoring, and shutting down. Connectivity of IoT, Point of Sale (POS), and other devices is highly valuable to retail storefronts, early adopters of DENT. DENT 2.0 also adds traffic policing, helping mitigate attack situations that overload the CPU.

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What does DENT mean?

Posted Mar 9, 2022 14:25 UTC (Wed) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link] (2 responses)

What does DENT stand for? I assume since it's in all caps that it's an acronym, but I can't seem to find out what it means anywhere. Or am I just so dumb that it's obvious to everyone else but me?

What does DENT mean?

Posted Mar 9, 2022 17:34 UTC (Wed) by shemminger (subscriber, #5739) [Link]

Guess:
Disaggregated
Enterprise
Network
Technology

It is a distro based on ONL and Debian (buster). I.e not on current stable.

"Amazon, the project’s driver, announced the launch of DENT in December of 2019. It aims to create a NOS that would simplify enterprise edge networking software, making it more accessible for cost-sensitive markets. DENT OS was released as open source on December 12, 2020."

The initial focus of project seems to be edge/retail use case.

What does DENT mean?

Posted Mar 9, 2022 19:11 UTC (Wed) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

they want to make a dent in the market for router distro, at least that part is obvious!

DENT 2.0 released

Posted Mar 9, 2022 17:39 UTC (Wed) by mrugiero (guest, #153040) [Link] (6 responses)

What does this bring to the table compared to other router OSes such as OpenWRT?

DENT 2.0 released

Posted Mar 9, 2022 20:03 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (5 responses)

DENT is designed to work on high-performance hardware for enterprise customers, not on consumer-grade hardware for home users. It doesn't have a web UI, for example.

DENT 2.0 released

Posted Mar 9, 2022 22:37 UTC (Wed) by beagnach (guest, #32987) [Link] (4 responses)

So this is a replacement for the *BSD-based systems currently used in such gear?

DENT 2.0 released

Posted Mar 9, 2022 23:10 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

BSD is not really used for routing. Some routers like Juniper use BSD for their control plane but have a separate hardware forwarding plane.

This distro is kinda both. It has support for configuring hardware (like switches) and fast software-based routing.

DENT 2.0 released

Posted Mar 10, 2022 8:58 UTC (Thu) by beagnach (guest, #32987) [Link] (1 responses)

> Some routers like Juniper use BSD for their control plane but have a separate hardware forwarding plane.

It's been over a decade but yes, I remember Free(?)BSD on Juniper.
I had thought I'd remembered some flavour of BSD on big Cisco iron, am I wrong in that?

Does the hardware forwarding plane even run an OS? My (rudimentary) understanding was that the BSD OS on the control plane ran a configuration shell that the networking people then used to issue commands that were then communicated to firmware running on the forwarding plane which implemented them as routing policies.

DENT 2.0 released

Posted Mar 10, 2022 16:01 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I'm not sure about that, all the Cisco variants I've worked with run Linux in some capacity, even the old Cat6k uses Linux to bootstrap IOS or maybe as part of the routing engine on the newer supervisors IIUC, but IOS-XE, NX-OS and IOS-XR are all Linux-based firmware that run user-space daemons for all their features and kernel drivers which program the hardware ASICs that make up the data-plane. They even use LXC vm/containers for the NX-OS vDC feature which allows partitioning of the router or for the guestshell which allows you to run an OVA image on the switch/router. A lot of linux-isms leak out if you are paying attention (kernel log message, using GRUB for booting, ext4 filesystems, curl for file transfers, etc.)

DENT 2.0 released

Posted Mar 9, 2022 23:46 UTC (Wed) by shemminger (subscriber, #5739) [Link]

It looks Amazon competitor to Sonic that was originally developed by Microsoft.
These both target running on commercial whitebox switch hardware.

DENT 2.0 released

Posted Mar 10, 2022 21:51 UTC (Thu) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link]

I would love to see a simple compare/contrast between DENT and DANOS, both LF projects. Plus the rest: VyOS, SONiC, ONL, ...

Few of them are terribly good at describing uses and feature matrices up front. I'm sure there's stuff buried in each's documentation, but I seriously don't have the time to wade through them myself. Particularly since much of it seems out of date, partial, or, worse yet, to consist mostly of white papers.

DENT 2.0 released

Posted Mar 10, 2022 22:34 UTC (Thu) by rknight (subscriber, #26792) [Link] (1 responses)

They don't do a very good job of outlining what hardware this is geared toward!

DENT 2.0 released

Posted Mar 18, 2022 10:53 UTC (Fri) by ghane (guest, #1805) [Link]

The only page I can find is for v1: https://dent.dev/dentos/ . Scroll to the bottom.