Recommended development boards

[minexn]

Are there any boards you use for development or recommend testing Infix?

[wkz]

For the time being, we are mostly focused on customer boards that are not publicly available. But the designs center around the CN9130 SoC connected to a 88E6393X switch (both from Marvell), and there is a reference board for this combo from Marvell: "Marvell CN9130 CRB". We have run Infix on this board before, and it would probably be pretty easy to bring that back up again. Unfortunately, those boards seem hard to come by.

Another board we've looked at, but not yet done any work with, is the RB5009UB from MikroTik. This has the same switch, and a smaller version of the same SoC.

[troglobit]

The current focus is definitely on the Marvell SOHO/Linkstreet line of switchcores, we know them very well, so they've been a safe design choice for customer deliveries (single or multiple switchcores in a cascade for more ports). The MikroTik board (above) is very close in functionality to one of our customers, and it's affordable, so very likely to become our reference board for Infix, I'd say.

Future projects are, however, likely to lean more towards Microchip. Their LAN966x (Laguna) family of switches, following on from the mighty SparX-5i (Fireant), fits much of our customer base like a glove. (Don't let the number of ports scare you, it's the core switching performance that's the important metric.) They also have the smaller switches in the KSZ-line (Maserati), which we are also looking at for some projects. Microchip are also very pro Open Source, even for their high end chipsets, and actively supporting their kernel drivers.

Other boards may appear too, I personally like the R2S very much, but it'll probably not make it to our test rigs and become 100% supported (e.g., RAUC, MAC addresses from a VPD prom, etc). I'm also working on the Banana PI R3 router board (BPI-R3), which is the precursor for the R4 which seems to become the OpenWRT reference board.

[wkz]

Microchip is definitely the future. Their stance on Open Source is great, actively developing and supporting open switchdev drivers.

I would just like to make a small amendment to @troglobit's message, because the codename-to-series mappings are not quite right. Just so there's no confusion on the Microchip families:

Series	Codename	Description
VSC755x	Fireant	Up to 200G fabric with 25G SERDES
LAN969x	Laguna	Up to 102G fabric with 10G SERDES
LAN966x	Maserati	Small TSN switch with up to 8 ports of 1/2.5G
KSZxxxx	-	Low-cost switches

[troglobit]

Updated list of currently supported boards are on our homepage https://kernelkit.org/platforms/