On today’s Packet Pushers episode, we dive into the guts of Cisco’s IOS-XR. What does it mean for IOS-XR to be carrier-grade? What kinds of problems need to be solved by large service providers? How does the architecture of IOS-XR solve them?

Cisco is our sponsor for this deconstruction of the NOS. Our guests are Jag Tangirala, Principal Engineer; and Praveen Bhagwatula, Distinguished Engineer.

We start by examining the scalability, performance and reliability requirements that carries and service providers demand, and then drill into IOS-XR’s architecture.

We break out the control, data, management and infrastructure planes and look at the role of abstraction in a network OS.

Our guests delve into what state means in the context of a network OS. We look at how IOS-XR captures and communicates state to the processes that need it using tools such as SysDB and an event notification system.

The discussion also tracks what happens if a process crashes and how the system recovers, and we look at how IOS-XR gets updated.

Join us for a truly deep dive into this OS. And get more details on IOS-XR at @xrdocs.io.