VyOS - Blog

Pull request creation guidelines

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Tue, 07 May 2024 18:28:18 GMT

Hello, Community!

We are always glad to see new contributors, and we are happy to make an effort to help them get started and feel valued, which is why we make sure that the latest development branch (current) is always trivial to build and offer rewards such as contributor subscriptions to prebuilt LTS release images.

However, we often see first-time contributors get confused about our development process. We have already posted bug/feature request creation guidelines to help users and testers navigate the process — now it's time to talk about pull requests.

Currently, GitHub is our primary source code location, and all contributions to the codebase are made through pull requests. That process is already familiar to people who contribute to other open-source projects, but there are some points specific to VyOS to pay attention to.

Community, Contributors, User Base and LTS builds

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 12:56:00 GMT

Hello, Сommunity!

Recently, there have been a lot of questions about LTS release-building procedures. We are making changes in that area — not least due to specific patterns in user behavior, and now it's a good time to discuss that.

Feature requests and bug reports

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 21:25:23 GMT

Hello, Community!
We haven't had clear guidelines on when and how to create suitable tasks in our Phorge development portal for a long time. As the community grows, we need such guidelines more and more to ensure that tasks get resolved. We are also changing our policy of never closing tasks for inactivity, although we will still close them only under particular and limited circumstances.

Join VyOS at FOSDEM 2024 (Feb 3-4)

yago.blanquet@vyos.io (Santiago Blanquet) — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 07:13:53 GMT

Hello, community!

We're thrilled to announce that VyOS will be part of FOSDEM 2024, one of the most significant and vibrant events in the open-source world. We're excited to meet you there!

VyOS and VPP - progress and plans

taras@vyos.io (Taras Pudiak) — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 10:50:03 GMT

A few months ago, attentive readers may have seen in the blog post that in rolling releases we included the VPP data plane. Most attentive may also notice that we have not published any updates or even related commits from that time. We want to clarify the situation with VPP and explain the future of VyOS with VPP. Also, ask for a little feedback from the community.

Short summary for those who want to save time: The VPP data plane integration is under active development and will be available for VyOS as an addon.

The decision about VPP integration was not spontaneous but was made at a moment when we did not have enough time to finish it before the next stable release date. We know, you waited for the next LTS version for a long time, and do not want to let you wait more before we stabilize VPP integration so much that it can be included in the main build without any risks for reliability.

But, where others see problems, we see opportunities. For many years we have had another long-standing idea - providing an ability for developers to create third-party addons for VyOS. And we thought - this can be a solution! Let's pretend that we are third-party developers and try this on our own skin. This allows us to unlock the 1.4 release date and still offer VPP for those who need it (later).

And we moved with all development to a new cozy place, outside of the main source code tree, where experiments cannot hurt anyone.

Now, after months of work and tests, we think it is time to click a switch: clean up vyos-1x from VPP and present the first (unstable, unreliable, not ready for production) VyOS addon - VPP data plane.

Previous VPP announcements did some buzz in the community, but there was almost no feedback. And we do not think this is because the solution was so perfect and complete that there were no bugs to describe or ideas to share. That is why, this time we ask for a little favor in exchange for a VPP addon access - we need your feedback.

It does not matter if you are an enthusiast who plays with the network long autumn evenings or an engineer in a big corporation who is searching for new solutions, your feedback is important and valuable. It allows us to create a solution that fits you first of all.

You can find a form that we ask you to fill out for access to the VPP addon at the end of this post. Access will be provided for one month (or longer - if you will be active), and you will need to contact us with feedback. We hope this is not such a big price for the ability to increase VyOS performance to previously unthinkable levels.

Meanwhile, here is what you may expect:
- full integration with kernel (transparent forwarding between kernel and VPP) for unicast traffic
- Ethernet interfaces
- Bonding interfaces
- VLANs
- VXLAN
- GRE

Please, fill out this form to get access. We hope you will get joy while playing with the addon!

VyOS Sundays #2: join us on September the 25th, 16:00 UTC

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 15:26:58 GMT

Hello Community!

In our live stream, we'll discuss the following topics:

OpenCollective and its role in our project.
The distinction between "free as in price" and "free as in freedom" and the importance of being free as in freedom and open-source.
The future VyOS GUI — with a sneak peek at screenshots!

We will also determine the next winner in our hardware support survey competition! Join us on Twitch and ask your questions if you want. If you can't attend, that's fine — we'll keep a recording.

See you on Sunday, and have a great weekend!

VyOS 1.3.2 LTS release

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 15:34:23 GMT

Hello, community!

VyOS 1.3.2 LTS release is now available for subscribers to download and for everyone to build. It features over a dozen improvements and about fifty fixes for bugs and other issues. Among them is a command to remove DHCP leases, IP pools and multiplier options in BRAS features, and more. Read on for details!

VyOS on Open Collective

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Sun, 02 Jan 2022 18:43:53 GMT

Hello Community!

Happy New Year to you and your families! And the beginning of a new year is an excellent time to make improvements that will help our community—particularly people who make donations.

We are grateful to everyone who donates! Along with technical contributors and commercial users, our donors help sustain the project. Since the introduction of donations in December 2019, we've received $18,080 in donations—that helps us cover operational expenses including those required to set up the Foundation. Now there’s a better way to donate, receive rewards, and fund community contributors:

Support VyOS on OpenCollective

VyOS Foundation—Work In Progress

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Sun, 12 Dec 2021 17:03:18 GMT

Hello Community!

You may remember that we were to set up a non-profit VyOS Foundation and that we started that process already back then. The progress wasn't very fast, but now pieces of that puzzle are finally falling in place.

A few companies already confirmed their intention to join the foundation, including Arsys, Flow Swiss, Stratus Networks, and ZTelco, and we are talking to more prospective members.

Growing VyOS community and project side by side

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Wed, 01 Jul 2020 08:31:25 GMT

There is a popular fiction that if you have a good project, a community automatically forms around it and gives it the publicity it deserves. In reality, it varies. It’s more than possible to have a lot of publicity without any project at all, as we see with a lot of startups that turn out to be vaporware. They get their publicity by talking about the supposed product everywhere.

The reality is that good projects also get their publicity… by talking about their project everywhere. The more you talk about it, the more visible you are. In CatB, Eric Raymond admits that he “grew his beta list by adding to it everyone who contacted him about fetchmail”—a practice that looks borderline spammy.

Images for labs, geeks and other non-production use

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Tue, 12 May 2020 16:33:34 GMT

You might have noticed Patreon and BuyMeACoffee donate buttons. We introduced them silently, and we are happy to see people donating just because they want to support the project. However, there are benefits for those who donates—you asked us for a new way to contribute and get access to LTS images, and now it's here.

Contributors, contributions and badges

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Sun, 03 Feb 2019 16:00:00 GMT

Looks like there’s quite a bit of misunderstanding regarding free subscriptions for contributors, who is eligible, and how people can contribute to the VyOS Project.

Change is coming to VyOS project

yuriy@sentrium.io (Yuriy Andamasov) — Sat, 31 Dec 2016 05:49:15 GMT

People often ask us the same questions, such as if we know about Debian 6 EOL, or when 1.2.0 will be released, or when this or that feature will be implemented. The short answer, for all of those: it depends on you. Yes, you, the VyOS users.

Here’s what it takes to run an open source project of this type. There are multiple tasks, and they all have to be done:

Emergency fixes and security patches
Routine bug fixes, cleanups, and refactoring
Development of new features
Documentation writing
Testing (including writing automated tests)

All those tasks need hands (ideally, connected to a brain). Emergency bug fixes and security patches needs a team of committed people who can do this job on a short notice, which is attainable in two ways, either there are people for whom it’s their primary job, or the team of committed people is large enough to have people with spare time at any given moment.

Cleanups and refactoring are also things that need a team of committed people because those are things that no one benefits from in a short run, it’s about making life easier for contributors and improving the sustainability of the project, keeping it from becoming an unmanageable mess. Development of new features needs people who are personally interested in those features and have the expertise to integrate them in a right way. It’s perfect if they also maintain their code, but if they simply hand documented and maintainable code to the maintainers team, that’s good enough.

Now, the sad truth is that VyOS Project has none of those. The commitment to using it among its users greatly exceeds the commitment to contributing to it. While we don’t know for certain how many people are using VyOS, we have at least some data. At the moment, there are 600 users of the official AMI on AWS. There were 11k+ users last month on user guide page and it’s constantly growing since the time when I took up the role of the community manager of the VyOS project. We are also aware about companies that have around 1k VyOS instances and companies that rely on VyOS in their business operations in one way or another. But still, if we talk about consumers vs. contributors, we see 99% consumers vs 1% contributors relation.

My original idea was to raise awareness of the VyOS project by introducing a new website, refreshing the forum look, activating social media channels and introducing modern collaboration tools to make participation in the project easier, open new ways how users and companies can participate and contribute. Finally bigger user base means there’s a larger pool of people and companies who can contribute to the project. We also launched commercial support with idea that if companies that using VyOS for their businesses can’t or just don’t want to participate in the project directly, the may be willing to support the project by purchasing support subscriptions.

10 months later I can admit that I was partially wrong in my thoughts. While consumer user base growing rapidly, i just can’t tell the same about contributors and this is a pity. Sure, we got a few new contributors, some of them contribute occasionally, other are more active, and some old contributors are back (Thank you guys for joining/re-joining VyOS!). We are also working with several companies that are showing interest in VyOS as a platform and contribute to the project in commercial means and via human resources, and that is great, however, it’s not enough at this scale.

At this point, I started thinking that current situation is not something that can be considered as fair and not really make sense.

This are just some of questions that came to my mind frequently:

Why those who not contributing literally nothing to the project, getting the same as others who spend their time and resources?
Why companies like ALP group using VyOS in their business and claiming publicly that they will return improvements to upstream when they are not actually returning anything? Why do some people think that they can come to IRC/Chat and demand something without contributing anything?
Why are those cloud providers that using VyOS for their businesses not bothering to support the project in any way?

I would like to remind you of the basic principles of the VyOS philosophy established from its start:

VyOS is a community driven project!

VyOS always will be an open source project!

VyOS will not have any commercial or any other special versions!

However, if we all want VyOS to be a great project, we all need to adhere to those principles, otherwise, nothing will happen. Community driven means that the driving force behind improvements should be those interested in them. Open source means we can’t license a proprietary component from a third party if existing open source software does not provide the feature you need. Finally, free for everyone means we all share responsibility for the success or failure of the project.

I’m happy and proud to be part of VyOS community and I really consider as my duty to help the project and the community grow. I’m doing what I can, and I expect that if you also care about the project, you will participate too.

We all can contribute to the project, no matter if you are developer or network engineer or neither of this.

There are many tasks that can be done by individuals with zero programming involved:

Documentation (documenting new features, improving existing wiki pages, or rewriting old documentation for Vyatta Core)
Support community in forums/IRC/chat (we have English and localized forums, and you can request a channel in your native language like our Japanese community did)
Feature requests (well described use cases from which can benefit all our community: note that a good feature request should make it easier for developers to implement it, just saying you want MPLS is not quite the same as researching existing open source implementations, trying them out, making sample configs contributors with coding skills can use for the reference, drafting CLI design and so on!)
Testing & Bug reports
Design discussions, such as those in the VyOS 2.0 development digest

If you work at the company that uses VyOS for business needs please consider talking with CEO/CTO about:

Providing full/part time worker(s) to accomplish tasks listed above
Provide paid accounts in common clouds for development needs
Provide HW and license for laboratory (we need quite a lot of HW to support all of the hypervisors, same is true about licenses for interworking testing)
Buy commercial support & services

In January, we’d like to have a meeting with all current contributors to discuss what we can do to increase participation in the project.

Meanwhile, I would like to ask you to share this blog post to all whom it may concern.

All of the VyOS users (especially those companies that use VyOS in their business) should be aware that is time to start participate in the project if you want to keep using VyOS and rely on it in the future.

Brace yourself.

Change is coming!

VyOS on Facebook

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 05:10:05 GMT

https://www.facebook.com/vyosofficial

VyOS Japan user group

daniil@sentrium.io (Daniil Baturin) — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 15:48:26 GMT

VyOS users from Japan have founded the first VyOS user group in the world. Group coordinator Yuya Kusakabe (who contributed L2TPv3 CLI lately) will announce it at Japan Vyatta Users group meeting tomorrow.