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On 09/08/2017 10:38 PM, Taiidan@gmx.com wrote:
Also want to add why broadcom? I heard they didn't have a good attitude to open source and as a large company I imagine they have a lot of institutional inertia preventing that from changing? - why not one of the smaller NIC makers such as atheros, mellanox, solarflare etc?
Cost was the main driver for this design. Our focus was on getting the product to market at a reasonable price point, and Broadcom's NetXtreme series already has excellent Linux driver support, meaning that we didn't need to invest additional resources into driver development. Depending on what the uptake of Talos II is (and therefore how much "nice to have" development we can justify vs. simply keeping a functional, RYF-certifiable product on the market) we may consider changes to the NIC supplier in the future.
As to why not Intel, in addition to the obvious issues in relation to sourcing a critical system component from a direct competitor, we have experienced issues with Intel GbE NICs in the past under Linux related to the on-chip firmware locking up and requiring a host reboot. The NetXtreme devices appear to be quite stable, and their internal operation has already been partially documented, meaning development of a true open firmware port is at least possible. The same cannot be said for the other players in this space.
- -- Timothy Pearson Raptor Engineering +1 (415) 727-8645 (direct line) +1 (512) 690-0200 (switchboard) https://www.raptorengineering.com