The Open Infrastructure Foundation today announced the general availability of StarlingX 8.0, which provides telcos with a new open source cloud and edge computing platform release with a focus on O-RAN (Open Radio Area Network) in particiular.

The Open Infrastructure Foundation was known as the OpenStack Foundation until October 2020, when the open source cloud computing effort rebranded in an effort to broaden its focus. The StarlingX project got its start in 2018 as a platform effort that makes use of OpenStack as well as other open source cloud technologies including Kubernetes and Ceph to help enable edge computing to telco use cases.

Among the big changes in the new StarlingX 8.0 update is a shift to the Debian Linux operating system, support for O-RAN  standard as well the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) all in an effort to help telco users with IoT, 5G and edge computing deployments. StarlingX 8.0 also claims a 50% reduction of the platform footprint for 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, enabling more vRAN capacity.

"StarlingX is currently a popular choice in the telecommunications segment with operators such as T-System, Verizon, Vodafone, and more using the platform as part of their infrastructure for 5G workloads and RAN deployments," ldikó Váncsa, senior manager, Community & Ecosystem, for the Open Infrastructure Foundation, told SDxCentral. "The project’s awareness of RAN requirements along with the built-in distributed cloud concept make a great fit to power large telecom networks."

A key part of the StarlingX 8.0 update is a focus on compliance with O-RAN specifications.

Greg Waines, senior member of technical staff at Wind River, which is a leading contributor to StarlingX, told SDxCentral that the O-RAN support includes enabling the cloud platform for O-RAN O2 IMS/DMS and O-RAN PTP (precision time protocol) Notification v2 compliant interfaces.

PTP is a critical standard for ensuring accurate time keeping across a network. Waines said that the major enhancement for PTP support in StarlingX 8.0 is the O-RAN compliance, namely to support O-Cloud Notification API Specification for Event Consumers. According to Waines, that specification enables cloud workloads to receive events and status updates related to PTP that would normally only be known to the infrastructure.

"This functionality is especially critical for workloads, such as 5G workloads which require precise timing and must take immediate action in response to changes in the synchronization state of their time source," Waines said.

A big shift with StarlingX 8.0 is the shift away from the CentOS Linux distribution to a Debian Linux distribution, specifically the 11.3 'Bullseye' release. StarlingX relies on Linux as its foundational operating system.

Waines said that the original trigger to consider an alternative choice for a Linux distribution arose when the CentOS Project announced plans to stop the support of CentOS Linux 8 at the end of 2021. At the same time, they also shifted focus to CentOS Stream, but it came with a very different support model, for instance, delayed availability of critical fixes or providing them via package updates, thus removing package versions that the StarlingX Community might rely on. The StarlingX community performed an evaluation of other options and ended up choosing Debian Bullseye (11.3) OS on Linux 5.10 Yocto-based Kernel to use as base operating system for the platform.

"The Debian operating system with the Yocto-based kernel provides various carrier-grade features, such as 'threaded interrupts', available Linux security modules (LSMs) like ‘apparmor' or ‘selinux' and availability of trusted computing tools such as 'tpm-tools', to mention a few, " Waines said.

Looking forward, Waines said that the StarlingX Community has been and will continue replying on its user ecosystem to provide feedback and information about production deployments of the project.

"The platform has been running in production at large telecom operators such as Verizon and Vodafone, on the scale of tens of thousands of locations," he said.