Re: 10Gb and 40Gb equipment available

[Thor Lancelot Simon]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 10:42:21AM -0500, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> NetBSD has received a donation of 10Gb Ethernet switches (Arista 7124S or SX
> and 7050).
> 
> We will use some of these switches in our own infrastructure but are
> offering others for long-term use by developers interested in using them to
> work on NetBSD-related projects.
> 
> An immediately obvious project would be porting of additional 10Gb card
> drivers, such as those for Broadcom, Solarflare, or Mellanox cards.  I
> can supply cards and cabling for this purpose.

I should note that another obvious project would be support for link-layer
encryption (MACsec) in our kernel.  I haven't used it on these switches
but according to the datasheet, it is supported.

The Linux kernel and many Windows drivers support this and it is
becoming an increasingly common protocol for protecting LAN and WAN
traffic (particularly in light of the recent slew of vulnerabilities in
IKE implementations and consequent nervousness about IPsec on WAN
links).

This should be a fairly simple task starting with the existing code for
encryption on wireless networks.  Strictly speaking, since this could be
tested card-to-card there is no need for a switch with MACsec support to
do this work, but we would be more than happy to supply one of these
switches to an interested and capable developer as a reference peer for
the protocol(s) (encryption and key negotiation).


-- 
 Thor Lancelot Simon  t...@panix.com

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the
inheritor of our fear.  -Alan Paton

10Gb and 40Gb equipment available

[Thor Lancelot Simon]

NetBSD has received a donation of 10Gb Ethernet switches (Arista 7124S or SX
and 7050).

We will use some of these switches in our own infrastructure but are
offering others for long-term use by developers interested in using them to
work on NetBSD-related projects.

An immediately obvious project would be porting of additional 10Gb card
drivers, such as those for Broadcom, Solarflare, or Mellanox cards.  I
can supply cards and cabling for this purpose.

These are low-latency switches with a fairly rich L2 and L3 feature
set (though lacking newer features such as VXLAN encapsulation).  They run
Linux as the control plane OS and user-provided code on the control plane
is expressly supported.  A few features perhaps of note to NetBSD developers
include MACsec support, port mirroring over GRE, rapid, multiple, and
per-VLAN spanning-tree, equal cost multipath routing, and multichassis
link aggregation ("MLAG").

The 7050 switches have 40Gb ports.  I have a *limited* quantity of 40Gb
adapters and cabling available which we can provide to developers who
demonstrate a serious interest in working on 40Gb card drivers and
related stack features (e.g. large receive).  The adapters are Solarflare
and Mellanox, and suitable-licensed FreeBSD drivers are available as a
starting point.

The switch software is EOL by Arista and has some open security issues
which mean that the control plane should *not* be exposed to untrusted
networks.  This should not be a problem for development work.

Please let me know before the end of February if you want hardware from
this donation, and why.

-- 
 Thor Lancelot Simon  t...@panix.com

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the
inheritor of our fear.  -Alan Paton