Dear Carl-Daniel,
Am 25.07.23 um 18:54 schrieb Carl-Daniel Hailfinger:
is there any currently commercially available switch or router hardware (10Gbit/s or more) running coreboot and preferably also Linux?
I'm currently trying to build a PoC network where all components have mostly FOSS firmware and operating systems.
My Wifi access points and 1 Gbit/s switches are running U-Boot and OpenWrt, so on that tier I'm covered. OpenWrt is even running on very few select 10 Gbit/s switches, but there the bootloader seems to be U-Boot+blob.
My institute is migrating to using whitebox switches with dentOS [1]. These are ARM devices with ONIE support, so the firmware part – U-Boot in this case, no coreboot – is FLOSS with the Marvell switching ASIC supported by Linux’ swtichdev interface. dentOS is a Open Network Linux fork, and therefore also based on Debian. There are alternatives like Replica.one [2], Gentoo based, and plans by Amazon to use Yocto/OpenEmbedded. (As it’s supported by the upstream Linux kernel, and the firmware should be in linux-firmware, you should be able to use any distribution.)
For routing, I'm currently using PCEngines APU2 with coreboot and Debian, but those are not really made to handle routing or even NAT at more than 1 Gbit/s.
No idea about the routing features of the RTL838x devices supported by OpenWrt [3][4]. My institute is going to use switches using that chip. Unfortunately, there is no vendor support (Zyxel), so using OpenWrt you are on your own.
Once the PoC phase is done, I expect required routing/NAT/packet filtering bandwidth to exceed 5 Gbit/s and I'd like to use a coreboot based product for that. If necessary, I can add a few network cards to a general-purpose server, but a purpose-built device would be preferred.
Suggestions? Comments?
Cisco Meraki, whatever that is, also has a coreboot port, that isn’t upstream though [5].
Kind regards,
Paul
[1]: https://dent.dev/ [2]: https://github.com/sartura/replica/ [3]: https://forum.openwrt.org/t/support-for-rtl838x-based-managed-switches/57875 [4]: https://svanheule.net/switches/rtl93xx [5]: https://mail.coreboot.org/hyperkitty/list/coreboot@coreboot.org/thread/NAJKJ...