The Design And Implementation Of Equipment And Interface Management For Switch Independent Verification Platform

With the continuous development of communication industry, network equipment needs improve, three-layer switch become indispensable communication equipment in computer network.Three-layer switch can be divided into centralized and distributed architecture. In a centralized switch, all the management and control tasks are done by the same CPU. The limitation for both CPU processing capacity and number of chips that can be exchanged in main control board results in poor system performance. However, in a distributed switch, each board has its own CPU, reducing the burden of master control board CPU, each interface board has independent three-layer forward chip to complete both in plate and across board transfer, improving system performance significantly. Therefore, distributed switches become high network equipment for main data exchange centers.However, many CPU board characteristics of distributed switches, their hardware validation is quite difficult. Traditionally, testers validated switch hardware by manipulating hardware items table testers at Linux background, and then the hardware test items were writen into veneer startup code, so as to avoid subsequent manual operation. But, test scheme and hardware change may need to rewrite the code, and it’s difficult to cooperate between veneers. In order to effectively verify various components and the overall function of three-layer switch products and achieve certain extensibility, it’s necessary to develop independent verification platform.This paper mainly discusses the design and implementation of equipment management module and interface management module in the platform. The two modules unify veneer and interface managing and monitoring, behave as bridges between testers and the hardware drivers. The main work of the thesis are as follows:1. Equipment management is the basis for the platform to run, it unified all single boards into a logic unit, monitoring and managing veneer electricity, registration, and heart rate. Based on deep study of three-layer switch, we also uses out-of-band for transmitting communication control information, which separated the control information and data information channels and enhanced the reliability of the system.2. Interface management module manages all interfaces in a switch, including attributes, capabilities, and the relationship between each other, with the module, users can query and configuration from the command line, interface change can be notified to other modules, the underlying hardware can be properly set, so as to ensure the validity of the behavior of hardware.3. System test results show that the equipment management module can successfully established communication channel between veneers,monitor veneers in real-time and lay a solid foundation for their modules to run. The interface management can provide real-time query and configure the interface state, to provide users with a simple command line interface friendly.The system overcome the difficulties of distributed switch, improved the efficiency of the hardware detection and monitoring, reduced testing labor cost, and achieved the expected goal. Further, with the increasing number of hot plug configuration files and interfaces, the performance of the system needs to be further optimized.