| 5 Jun 2025 |
 emily | right. I think both the cheapo Realtek stuff and mlxsw at least don't need userspace blobs | 13:50:03 |
| emily | AIUI from reading LKML posts, the Broadcom switch situation is that there's an "upstream" driver that basically just acts as a very dumb pipe between proprietary userspace tools and the switch ASIC | 13:50:24 |
| emily | so it's not quite what I'd consider a native Linux networking experience | 13:50:40 |
 hexa | or more like an sn2010 | 13:50:47 |
| hexa | so not exactly new, but still not worth abandoning 🙂 | 13:51:37 |
| hexa | we installed some debian to it and ran bird 1.6 probably | 13:51:50 |
| hexa | it was limited to 30k routes in hardware | 13:52:03 |
 Mr. Defenestrator | Yea that's kinda the case with broadcom ASICs. Mellanox switches have the best open source module imo. There may be some opportunity with MikroTik whatever in that price range, but I don't touch that stuff. | 14:10:10 |
| Mr. Defenestrator | You should buy not only the switch, but get a colo and start a NixOS based network shop ;) | 14:11:46 |
| Mr. Defenestrator | In reply to @hexa:lossy.network
it was limited to 30k routes in hardware 30k is plenty for that tier of switch IMO. If you have a Linux based BGP already, you could even do route filtering based off your flows and run a "digested" full table. I do that in production with Arista SRD | 14:16:03 |
| Mr. Defenestrator | If you really like extracting maximal hardware value. | 14:16:05 |
| emily | I thought people liked MiktroTik for running the actual vendor stuff but that mainline Linux wasn't really an option. could be wrong though | 15:27:44 |
 K900 | Usually the case yeah | 15:28:06 |
| emily | feel like I've fallen down enough of a rabbit hole already for now :) | 15:28:08 |
| K900 | Though Mikrotik hardware is also fairly commodity | 15:28:13 |
| emily | what kind of switch chips do they put in them? | 15:28:44 |
| emily | I thought it was custom stuff but maybe I'm wrong | 15:28:54 |
| K900 | Usually Marvell or Realtek stuff | 15:29:58 |
| emily | hm. | 15:30:34 |
| emily | AIUI the Realtek chip that OpenWrt does can actually be operated by an external CPU | 15:30:52 |
| emily | as in it can be a SoC with a MIPS processor, but it can also just be a "dumb" switch that you have an ARM chip talking to or something. | 15:31:05 |
| emily | I believe that nobody has implemented support for that in OpenWrt/mainline, but if there's a MikroTik thing with an AArch64 CPU and that Realtek chip it could be interesting… | 15:31:29 |
|  @tioan:dunwyn.xyz left the room. | 19:01:58 |
| 6 Jun 2025 |
 uep | rtl8367 seems to be the only realtek one they use recently | 01:45:32 |
| uep | there are some qualcomm (arm) and mediatek (mmips) ones with soc and small switch on the same chip | 01:46:23 |
| uep | everything that's a serious switch is marvell | 01:46:58 |
| hexa | (within the openwrt ecosystem) | 01:48:15 |
| emily | how can I find these things? when I go to https://toh.openwrt.org/?view=network and sort by SFP+s, very little shows up. I've seen that other listings don't have stuff in that field but searching SFP in the net comments also doesn't turn up much | 13:24:59 |
| emily | I'm interested in everything OpenWrt can run that has more than a handful of 10 Gbit/s SFP+ | 13:25:21 |
| emily | https://openwrt.org/docs/techref/hardware/soc/soc.marvell mostly talks about GbE (I guess the page seems fairly old) | 13:26:09 |
