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Lihua Yuan edited this page Mar 5, 2017 · 23 revisions

###Q: What is SONiC?

A. SONiC is a collection of networking software components required to have a fully functional L3 device. It is designed meet the requirements of cloud data center. It is fully open-sourced at OCP.

###Q. Is SONiC a Linux distribution?

A. No. SONiC is Linux-based, but is not a distribution by itself. Today, SONiC runs on Debian Jessie. SONiC has also been ported to Ubuntu (as a snap).

Q. How can I get SONiC?

A. If you clone the sonic-buildimage repo and follow the instruction there, you should be able to produce the SONiC image yourself. Our Jenkins server also produce a regular build. So you can download the image there as well. The list of supported devices and ASICs are maintained here.

Q. How can I get the source code of SONiC?

A. SONiC is fully open-sourced on github, and distributed under Apache License. It is maintained as multiple github repos instead of a single big repo for manageability reasons. The list of SONiC source code repos are maintained here.

Q. SONiC uses SAI, where can

Q. Does the SONiC offer Linux options, and/or can it be customized?

A. Today (March, 2017) SONiC requires Linux kernel 3.16. We built and tested on Debian Linux, but theoretically any distribution could be supported. It is fully open sourced and can be customized by users. A contributor’s guide is posted to cover how to add documentation, code and report and fix bugs.

##Hardware

Q. Which hardware platforms and ASIC chipset are you running SONiC on?

A. You can find a full list of supported platforms here.

SONiC uses SAI, which enabled SONiC to work across multiple ASICs.

Q. Does SONiC have its own hardware?

A. No. SONiC is purely a software solution.

Q. How can I port SONiC on a new device?

A. Please follow the porting guide.

##Deployment and Support

Q. Is SONiC deployed in Microsoft datacenters today?

A. Yes, SONiC is deployed in Microsoft production datacenters.

Q. How many devices are SONiC based?

A. The deployment is growing from one datacetner to cross regions. We plan to rapidly expand SONiC deployment over the coming months.

Q. How is SONiC supported?

A. SONiC is a community supported product. Microsoft is committed to engage with community to keep SONiC relevant, reliable and stable. We use it in our own production network.

Microsoft has no plans to sell SONiC to customers or provide any network engineering or development support.

Q. What is the relationship between Azure Cloud Switch and SONiC?

A. Mostly. ACS builds on top of SONiC with internal cloud management applications.

##Contribution Q. How can I contribute to SONiC?

A. SONiC welcome collaboration with the community in many different capacities. Please check the contributors guide for details: https://github.com/Azure/SONiC/wiki

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