Industry’s first fully open source SDK announced

Broadcom Limited has announced the immediate availability of SDKLT, a revolutionary table-driven approach to configure Ethernet switch ASICs. This is supposedly the industry’s first fully open source software development kit (SDK) for Ethernet switch ASICs, and has been built to accelerate the software development of high-performance networking infrastructure.

With the release of the open sourced SDKLT, Broadcom is establishing its position as the market leader in not only providing Ethernet switch silicon, but also in delivering an open, scalable and high-performance switch SDK. By offering a complete open source SDK, Broadcom takes a significant step forward towards fulfilling the vision of an entirely open networking ecosystem.

Now, hardware vendors, network OS providers, and SDN controller developers can readily build and customise their switch APIs. They can also freely redistribute

their enhancements and leverage community support to quickly deliver high-quality solutions to the market.

The innovative, logical table-based approach used in SDKLT greatly simplifies the task of configuring the feature-rich Ethernet switch silicon in use today. The new switch software approach empowers data centre operators with greater control over their infrastructure resources. The open sourced SDK introduces new ways to monitor, analyse and provision switch resources by using industry standard automation tools.

Broadcom shared that the newly launched software development kit brings a fresh, state-of-art software development approach to the broader community of network software developers, where they can now fully and directly control and monitor the rich switch feature set optimised for SDN and cloud use cases.

SDKLT open source code is now available on GitHub and the logical table APIs are Apache 2.0 licensed. This enables users to build, customise and share innovation across a wide range of switch platforms and developers.