| 8 Jul 2025 |
 emily | who's gonna get NixOS on it | 12:53:27 |
 Emantor | I quickly skimmed the articles and it looks like this is a purely FPGA based switch design, so my guess is that the CPU is running within the FPGA if there is need for one. The specs of the FPGA look like it may be barely able to run linux, however I would not bet on that. | 12:59:31 |
| Emantor | If you want something that can run Linux it is a lot easier to look at the switches that OpenWRT recently added. | 13:01:03 |
 hexa | or buy one of the funny whitelabel switches that (used to) run cumulus linux | 13:03:44 |
| hexa | they come with onie, an installer environment that explicitly supports installing things to it | 13:04:35 |
| hexa | fun post wrt that https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/dell-switch-hacking | 13:04:59 |
| hexa | the problem will of course be broadcom firmware/drivers in most scenarios 🤪 | 13:05:19 |
 Molly Miller | i was about to say, that trick only works if you have a kernel driver for the asic, right? | 13:05:34 |
| Molly Miller | i have a number of whitelabel onie switches at work but they're all broadcom asics | 13:05:47 |
| hexa | the alternative is something from mellanox, but those are sfp+/sfp28 and larger only iirc | 13:05:49 |
| hexa | yeah, the mellanox ones have mainline support | 13:06:03 |
| hexa | the broadcom ones are fckd | 13:06:13 |
| Emantor | Broadcom, more like: https://github.com/mwarning/chaos-sticker-collection/blob/9f0415d815bbef4a01bf55bc3fe57bb75e4247bd/images/brokencom/brokencom.svg#L4 | 13:06:24 |
| hexa | so no copper connections | 13:06:27 |
| emily | yeah I hadn't actually read them when I said that 😆 | 13:06:43 |
| emily | I just saw "managed" | 13:06:47 |
