SONiC Notes

SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) is an open-source container-based network operating system (NOS). It is designed for efficient cloud networking use cases, emphasizing simplicity and management at scale.

This repository contains a structured, reader‑friendly collection of notes exploring SONiC architecture, Redis interactions, Linux integration, SAI, and five important flows.

Table of Contents

Introduction

• Introduction
• Assumptions

Architecture

• Architecture overview
• Redis in SONiC
• SONiC containers and processes
• Linux interactions
• SONiC data flow

Major flows

• Port VLAN configuration
• BGP route addition
• MAC learning
• Counters
• Port state change
• Troubleshooting

Appendices

• Linux netlink primer
• Redis primer
• libswsscommon API usage in C++
• SAI primer

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Contributing

Contributions are very welcome.

If you would like to contribute:

1. Open an issue describing your improvement idea, correction, or enhancement.
2. Submit a pull request with clear explanations and clean commits.
3. Keep the writing style consistent: concise, technical, and example‑driven.
4. Add diagrams or code snippets when they help clarify concepts.

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Meta Notes

These documents started as personal study notes created while learning and exploring SONiC internals. They are shared publicly so that anyone else who finds them useful can benefit.

If a section looks unfinished or sparse, it is likely because the content is still evolving.
This entire repository is a living document and a work in progress.

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Thanks for exploring — hope this helps deepen your understanding of SONiC!