fboss

Facebook Open Switching System Software for controlling network switches.

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2Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

1KGitHub stars

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Facebook Open Switching System Software for controlling network switches.

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Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

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HN mentions by year2 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-03-27 04:31:12 UTC to 2021-08-11 14:32:44 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

2 sources

It looks like the source for their FBOSS agent that runs on switches will enable PTP in two kinds of supported switches: https://github.com/facebook/fboss/blob/master/fboss/agent/hw... They have O(thousands) of switches (source: https://engineering.fb.com/2016/10/18/data-center-engineerin...) so IIRC they get the per-switch cost down by doing a custom design to reduce BOM. I believe the specs and designs are available under the Open Compute project here (search for "Facebook"): https://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Networking/SpecsAndDesigns

You can see an open source version of "big iron" networking gear, both hardware [1] and software [2]. They also use ASICs for most of the work and run Linux on the host CPU (so they can be managed like normal servers). [1] https://code.facebook.com/posts/843620439027582/facebook-ope... [2] https://github.com/facebook/fboss