03.12.2025

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# ALASCA SONiC Community Build - SCOMB

Attendees: Marius Feldmann, Andreas Köpsel, Bastian Heltmann,  Christian Lammers, Frank Benke, Heidi, Jonas Gorski, Kai Eder, Martin Hayes, Matthias Büchse, Matthias Haag, Moore Lee, Robert Volkmann, Roger Luethi, Taras Chornyi, Helena Ott

##### 1. Quick round of introduction

##### 2. Defined problem

Commercial SONiC works great, however the Community SONiC hasn’t been a great experience so far and doesn’t feel very serious. 

- There are a lot of issues with it:
  - Missing features
  - commands that don’t work 
  - missing interfaces on switches
  - missing transceiver information

##### 3. Discussion

→ ALASCA Community sees the need for a SONiC Community Build

→ Kick - Off: Talk was given about it at the ALASCA Summit in November 2025

→ Goal: Creating a solid and reliable community build of SONiC for a solid open source alternative for Switch OS

**Central points of discussion:**

- several people seem to have tried to improve SONiC Community Build and failed for different reasons
- there’s a strong dependency from Broadcom, as they have strict rules and conditions on the forking and buildig of a community SONiC
- Where do we get SAI from?
- further challenges were discussed

**BUT**:

- a lot of people have a real interest in an open source operating system for switches and there is indeed a big interest in solving that problem
- it’s hard to find valid information and the set up to make the project successful is still in its infancy → ALASCA could provide a better environment

→ so we’ll try again 🙂

##### 4. Starting off 

- we will begin with a very compact version of SCOMB
  - more features and complexity will be added as time goes on
  - we need to define a workflow and processes for collaborative work, which is why we start with a simple set up

###### WP 1: Requirements 

- Cloud&Heat will provide a SONiC deployment with basic configuration, which we’ll share with you within the next days
- Git Pipeline will be initiated by ALASCA with support from HAHN (Frank Benke) and Cloud&Heat Technologies (Max Brandt)

###### WP 2: Build Toolchain 

- Set up local repositories 
- Make build covering the collected features work from local repositories 
- Tbd: Build target (proposal: Edgecore Networks DCS203) 
- Who will set this up? 
  - Tbd. 

###### WP 3: Usability

- Select+port or design+prototype CLI capable to specify the relevant service configuration required by the community build v0.1 
- Who will define/create the CLI? 
  - tbd.

###### WP 4: Evaluation 

- Use the resulting SONiC instance within a target environment 
- Who will provide infrastructure for evaluation purposes?
  - tbd.

##### 5. Next Steps 

- a mailing list will be provided by ALASCA 
- find a slot for our SCOMB meeting every other week, beginning January 2026 
- further information regarding the SONiC deployment will follow in January