This is a seriously impressive project and it's been fun to follow along.<p>I almost hesitate to say anything, but the constant scope creep (that he readily admits in the blog) is starting to feel like a real obstacle to getting anything done. It's fun to see all of the theorizing about 96-port switches with $11K of FPGAs, but it would be fantastic if something like the simple 4-port switch design could be spun out as an open source project that people could iterate on.<p>I've also been following his solder-in probe projects for years ( <a href="https://www.antikernel.net/products.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.antikernel.net/products.html</a> ). There was a small Kickstarter and some reviews, but now the one distributor has 404s on the product pages and there are a lot of "coming soon" labels attached to all the different products and variations. Again, it would be fantastic if just one of those projects was available in distribution semi-reliably.
For the other end of the wire, sometimes you can find NetFPGA academic research devices on eBay. The project has been running for 15 years, with 5 generations of NICs, <a href="https://netfpga.org/" rel="nofollow">https://netfpga.org/</a><p><i>> A line-rate, flexible, and open platform for research, and classroom experimentation. More than 3,500 NetFPGA systems have been deployed at over 300 institutions in over 60 countries around the world.</i>
This is a great project I've been following along. My personal desire is to see this eventually support <a href="https://docs.kernel.org/networking/switchdev.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.kernel.org/networking/switchdev.html</a> (although it will likely be someone other than Andrew that implements this) since mainstream switching where it works just like regular Linux networking would change our world for the better!<p>We need fewer proprietary interfaces for such an important part of networking.
I wonder if the author considered at any point using Sparx-5 switch asic from Microchip? Those are available in single quantities for not too crazy price ($121 for 128G variant), and they are Linux based.<p>Of course I understand that having custom switch engine is far more satisfying to do.
"I was tipped off by a friend to a batch of Kintex UltraScale+’s, specifically the XCKU5P, on AliExpress for a mere $55 each. He had tested one from the seller and they appeared to be legitimate, although likely salvaged/reballed from some scrapped equipment."<p>Must be nice to know enough to be sure that your sketchy hardware isn't backdoored. I cannot imagine buying random network hardware from a sketchy source. Though I'm sure that if I had the author's chops, I wouldn't be too worried.<p>More broadly, network hardware is where the keyest vulnerabilities are. Open source network hardware is interesting from that perspective. You do not want random bad actor open source contributors adding backdoors.
Wow, this is very impressive. This reminds me of my years of designing the analog front end of ethernet PHYs (5 generations of 1G base-T, 3 geberations of 2.5G/5G/10G base-T, 1 experinental 7.5G, the first gen 25G base-T, 2 genetation of 1G-baseT1 and the first generation of 10G base-T1 over single shielded pair for automotive). I got my hands dirty with board level testing and a lot of the firmeare!<p>I'm curious if there are any 10G base-T or 25G base-T PHYs out there that one can buy at lower quantities.
There are 48+2 port switches with OpenWRT support.<p>Re: initial specs for the (4 port) OpenWRT One, which is built on Banana Pi's, which supports U-boot:
<a href="https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/01/12/openwrt-one-ap-24-xy-router-board-openwrt-banana-pi/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/01/12/openwrt-one-ap-24-xy...</a> .. <a href="https://openwrt.org/toh/openwrt/one" rel="nofollow">https://openwrt.org/toh/openwrt/one</a>:<p>> <i>The non-open-source components include the 2.5GbE PHY and WiFi firmware with blobs running on separate cores that are independent of the main SoC where OpenWrt is running. The DRAM calibration routines are closed-source binaries as well.</i><p>Software for FPGA switch, probe, and GHz oscilloscope projects?<p>/? inurl:awesome vivado
<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Aawesome+vivado" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Aawesome+vivado</a> :<p>awesome-hdl: <a href="https://github.com/drom/awesome-hdl">https://github.com/drom/awesome-hdl</a> :<p>sphinx-hwt:<p>d3-wave probably won't do GHz in realtime.
<a href="https://github.com/Nic30/d3-wave">https://github.com/Nic30/d3-wave</a><p>Pyqtgraph probably can't <i>realtime</i> plot GHz probe data without resampling either?<p>pyqtgraph: <a href="https://github.com/pyqtgraph/pyqtgraph">https://github.com/pyqtgraph/pyqtgraph</a><p>The hwtLib README says Vivado supports IP-XACT format.<p>hwtLib:
<a href="https://github.com/Nic30/hwtLib">https://github.com/Nic30/hwtLib</a> :<p>> <i>hwtLib is the library of hardware components writen using hwt library. Any component can be exported as Xilinx Vivado (IP-exact) or Quartus IPcore using IpPackager or as raw Verilog / VHDL / SystemC code and constraints by to_rtl() function. Target language is specified by keyword parameter serializer.</i><p>IP-XACT:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP-XACT" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP-XACT</a><p>hwtlib docs > hwtLib.peripheral.ethernet package:
<a href="https://hwtlib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/hwtLib.peripheral.ethernet.html" rel="nofollow">https://hwtlib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/hwtLib.peripheral.et...</a><p>hwtLib.peripheral.uart package:
<a href="https://hwtlib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/hwtLib.peripheral.uart.html" rel="nofollow">https://hwtlib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/hwtLib.peripheral.ua...</a><p>It looks like there are CRC implementations in hwtlib. Which CRC or hash does U-boot use for firmware flashing? <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=Which+CRC+or+hash+does+U-boot+use+for+firmware+flashing%3F" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=Which+CRC+or+hash+does+U-boo...</a> ... Looks like CRC32 like .zip files but not .tar.gz files.<p>U-boot: <a href="https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot">https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot</a><p>OpenWRT docs > "Failsafe mode, factory reset, and recovery mode":
<a href="https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/troubleshooting/failsafe_and_factory_reset" rel="nofollow">https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/troubleshooting/failsafe...</a><p>Open vSwitch:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_vSwitch" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_vSwitch</a> :<p>> <i>Open vSwitch can operate both as a software-based network switch running within a virtual machine (VM) hypervisor, and as the control stack for dedicated switching hardware; as a result, it has been ported to multiple virtualization platforms, switching chipsets, and networking hardware accelerators.[7]</i><p>"Porting Open vSwitch to New Software or Hardware":
<a href="https://docs.openvswitch.org/en/latest/topics/porting/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.openvswitch.org/en/latest/topics/porting/</a><p>awesome-open-source-hardware:
<a href="https://github.com/aolofsson/awesome-opensource-hardware">https://github.com/aolofsson/awesome-opensource-hardware</a><p>awesome-open-hardware:
<a href="https://github.com/delftopenhardware/awesome-open-hardware">https://github.com/delftopenhardware/awesome-open-hardware</a> :<p>> <i>Journal of Open Hardware (JOH)</i>, <i>HardwareX Journal</i>,