SONiC: Populating CONFIG_DB

Introduction

Before a switch can forward data traffic, its ASIC must first be programmed with the device's port configuration. This includes information such as the number of front-panel ports, their supported speeds, the number of lanes assigned to each port, the speed of each lane, and the administrative and operational state of every port.

SONiC relies heavily on a Redis-based database model. During startup, the configuration stored in config_db.json is loaded into CONFIG_DB. The *mgrd daemons running inside the SWSS container then receive the changes relevant to them through Redis Pub/Sub notifications. After a daemon has processed its part of the configuration, it publishes the corresponding application-level state to APPL_DB.

The orchagent process in the SWSS container monitors changes in APPL_DB, translates the application-level state into hardware objects suitable for ASIC programming, and publishes the resulting hardware objects to ASIC_DB. The actual ASIC programming takes place in the next stage: the syncd container monitors ASIC_DB changes and passes them through the SAI interface to the vendor-specific SDK, which interacts with the ASIC driver stack to program the physical switch ASIC.

This chapter focuses on port programming because it clearly illustrates the complete programming pipeline. Other configuration objects follow the Continue reading

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Enterprise AI Adoption: Requirements for Security, Governance, and Scale

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Requirements

Note: In many Linux distros the default for most kernel parameters are too low, for a kind cluster running KubeVirt. Use the following command to temporarily increase these limits.

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sudo sysctl -w fs.inotify.max_user_watches=1048576

If you face any Continue reading

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What are the dangers of relying on AI?

download

You can find Doug’s blog here.

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Mantis Shrimp dan Pukulan Tercepat di Dunia Hewan

Fenomena paling Continue reading

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This pledge is an important step, and it comes at a time of significant cyber risk. In the first quarter of 2026, Cloudflare's global network blocked an average of 234 billion cyber threats every day. Recently, we mitigated a hyper-volumetric DDoS attack that peaked at 31.4 Tbps. At the end of 2025, Cloudflare Continue reading

AI Assistants Have Many Interfaces. Context Is the Real Product.

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