A reader of my blog pointed out the following minutiae hidden at the very bottom of the Cumulus Linux 5.13 What’s New document:

NVIDIA no longer releases Cumulus VX as a standalone image. To simulate a Cumulus Linux switch, use NVIDIA AIR.

And what is NVIDIA AIR?

NVIDIA Air is a cloud-hosted, data center simulation platform that behaves like a real-world production environment. Use NVIDIA Air to create a digital twin of your IT infrastructure.

Why would one want to use it? The only reason I can find is the ASIC emulation:

Verify network behavior at highest fidelity without needing dedicated hardware

Having a dataplane implementation that’s reasonably close to the hardware one is awesome. However, there’s no reason one could not have the same code in a public VM image (apart from the ridiculous “but then anyone could look at it” argument).

I completely understand that vendors want you to register (so their sales and marketing teams can harass you) and accept an EULA before using their software (to make the legal department happy), but forcing users to use a cloud product is ridiculous.

It’s not like we wouldn’t have precedents for that phenomenal idea. Juniper attempted to push Junosphere¹ but quickly gave up, finally making relevant images downloadable with no strings attached. Cisco tried something similar (IIRC), but got to their senses and released CML. Most other vendors didn’t even bother.

To recap: In a world where most networking vendors give you VM images you can use to get familiar with their products² in a multi-vendor environment, NVIDIA expects you to deal with a cloud/GUI-based product that supports SONiC and Cumulus Linux on emulated NVIDIA hardware.

It’s sad to see how far the noble ideas of the original Cumulus Networks team have fallen. Maybe what Linus Torvalds said about NVIDIA before he became politically correct wasn’t so far off the mark :(