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Broadcom isn’t quite “opening up” its switch chips for the industry, but it’s taking a close step — giving developers access to otherwise proprietary APIs.

The vendor, which enjoys a dominant market share in Ethernet switch chips, announced the idea of the Open Network Switch Library (OpenNSL) a year ago. Today, at the Open Compute Summit in San Jose, Calif., Broadcom is releasing the first set of APIs in the library.

It’s a small set, including APIs that can support Facebook‘s FBOSS [facebook.com] operating system and Microsoft‘s Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI [microsoft.com]) [my link]. Broadcom has produced reference implementations for those two items — implementations that might not be ready for production use but still give developers something to work with, says says Eli Karpilovski, director of product management for Broadcom’s network switch group.
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Developers previously couldn’t get access to the Broadcom SDK without a nondisclosure agreement. The NDA wouldn’t necessarily cost money — Broadcom shared frequently with academic institutions, for instance — but it was necessary because the SDK offered too deep of a view into Broadcom’s chips, giving away intellectual property, Karpilovski says.
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“Think of the OpenNSL APIs as the SDK APIs but with a different interface,” Karpilovski says. They’re a tool for anyone wanting to develop open applications, even an open operating system, to run on Broadom’s switch chips.