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Facebook Open Switching System (FBOSS)

FBOSS is Facebook's software stack for controlling and managing OCP network switches.

The central component of FBOSS is the agent daemon, which runs on each switch, and controls the hardware forwarding ASIC. The agent daemon sends forwarding information to the hardware, and implements some control plane protocols such as ARP and NDP. The agent provides thrift APIs for managing routes, to allow external routing control processes to get their routing information programmed into the hardware forwarding tables.

FBOSS has been designed specifically to handle the needs of Facebook's data center networks. We hope it can be used as a starting point for other users wishing to use OCP switches in their environments. However, note that it will likely require additional development work to easily fit into other network environments. Until it matures more, FBOSS will likely be primarily of interest to network software developers, rather than to network administrators who are hoping to use it as an turnkey solution.

Dependencies​

FBOSS depends on the following libraries, and their dependencies:

  • facebook/fbthrift
  • facebook/folly

Missing Pieces​

FBOSS is still under heavy development, and we are also working to open source more of our tools and utilities for managing FBOSS. The initial open source release consists primarily of the agent daemon. There are a few components that are not (yet) part of the open source release:

Routing Daemon​

The FBOSS release does not yet contain a routing protocol daemon to talk to the FBOSS agent. The routing protocol daemon we use at Facebook is rather specific to our environment, and likely won't be as useful to the open source community. For the open source community it should be possible to modify an existing open source daemon like quagga to call the FBOSS thrift APIs, but we have not implemented this yet. In the meantime, we have included a small sample python script in fboss/agent/tools that can manually add and remove routes.

Management Tools​

The current code release has relatively few tools for interacting with and debugging the fboss agent. We have some tools that we are working to include in the open source repository soon. These didn't make it into the initial release simply due to time constraints. In the meantime, the thrift compiler can automatically generate a python-remote script to allow manual invocation of the agent's various thrift interfaces.