[Cerowrt-devel] stanford talk/deluged in hardware/yurtlab

Mon Feb 4 11:41:27 EST 2013

I hadn't researched the HPC FMC requirement for 10 GigE one yet.

The 1 GigE one is expensive, but not because of parts cost.  This is the usual huge markup that goes with stuff sold to "Design Engineers" in companies - because they can charge, they do.

The zedboard PMOD interface seems to be more marketing appropriate for "cheap" stuff.  There is a PMOD for 100baseT, so you could throw a few of those on your system very cheaply.   Since the interface to PMODs is 8-bit parallel, all you might need is the magnetics and PHY for GigE, and you could make a soft GigE controller in the programmable logic part of the Zynq-7020.  I'd have to check that the signalling rates would be sustainable across the PMOD connector.

To make an FMC board, populate it with whatever GigE chip you like, etc. is trivial.  It should cost no more to fabricate than one of these little single chip GigE PCIe cards you can buy.   What chip would you like to use?   I (or others) could design the board and BOM, kit it up for manufacturing (by, say, Sunstone or other places that do PC boards and kitted assembly in small runs).

Trivial stuff - maybe one could even convince Digilent and/or Avnet to do the design/mfring.

Wouldn't it be a lot better to have a pluggable and completely flexible highly scalable monitoring unit that could go down the wire level as needed, with the base cost being the $300 that a Zedboard goes from?

And it would be completely "open hardware" and :"open source".

-----Original Message-----
From: "Dave Taht" <dave.taht at gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 3, 2013 8:47pm
To: dpreed at reed.com
Cc: "Mark Constable" <markc at renta.net>, cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
Subject: Re: [Cerowrt-devel] stanford talk/deluged in hardware/yurtlab

Darn I wish I'd made it to that show today.

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 5:11 PM,  <[mailto:dpreed at reed.com] dpreed at reed.com> wrote:

[http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/2/prweb9154394.htm] http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/2/prweb9154394.htm (10 GigE FMC card)

 impressive. Seems to require a hpc (high pin count) board, which zed isn't.

[http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/1-2AJPAV.htm] http://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/1-2AJPAV.htm (1 GiGE FMC card)

625 eu. While I am painfully aware of how much it costs to step ahead of the bleeding edge, I think the odds are pointing harder and harder at doing a non-fpga design that does what I want...

I may go back to looking at octeons or ti's new octeon killer.

And/or leveraging a newer atheros reference board.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Dave Taht" <[mailto:dave.taht at gmail.com] dave.taht at gmail.com>

Sent: Sunday, February 3, 2013 1:39pm
To: [mailto:dpreed at reed.com] dpreed at reed.com
Cc: "Mark Constable" <[mailto:markc at renta.net] markc at renta.net>, [mailto:cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net] cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
 Subject: Re: [Cerowrt-devel] stanford talk/deluged in hardware/yurtlab

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 10:26 AM,  <[mailto:dpreed at reed.com] dpreed at reed.com> wrote:

It would be trivial to do this with a Zedboard.

Well, need two network ports. Haven't figured out much on interfacing the thing to offboard gear (I'd have liked it if it had a pci interface). So is interfacing up a second network card "trivial" on the I/Os provided?

And wanted esata, or some high speed disk I/O interface for captures.

I'd rather like to continue forward on the zedboard front. The prospect of designing an ethernet chip that actually could incorporate fq_codel etc is very exciting. The RGII interface is available to access directly, in particular.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Dave Taht" <[mailto:dave.taht at gmail.com] dave.taht at gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 3, 2013 1:17pm
 To: "Mark Constable" <[mailto:markc at renta.net] markc at renta.net>
 Cc: [mailto:cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net] cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
 Subject: Re: [Cerowrt-devel] stanford talk/deluged in hardware/yurtlab

Well, I see it for 320. Then you need to add a SSD, and a decent network card, and I suppose it could be made to work. Awful big, tho, in an era where I can get 1/2TB on an 2.5 inch SSD.

What I'd wanted was closer to a dreamplug - 160 bucks, two network ports, but with an internal SSD. bonus points if it fit into a 1U rack and ate as little power as possible.

Principal use case here is to be a "network monitor" with enough oomph to run stuff like cacti/mrtg/snmp tools, as well as do captures off of a mirrored switch port.

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 10:10 AM, Dave Taht <[mailto:dave.taht at gmail.com] dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 10:03 AM, Mark Constable <[mailto:markc at renta.net] markc at renta.net> wrote:

On 2013-02-03 09:18am, Dave Taht wrote:
 > I'm grumpy, as it doesn't have an esata interface internally, apparently.

[https://www.google.com?q=HP+N40L+MicroServer] https://www.google.com?q=HP+N40L+MicroServer

 I know this is no where near an embedded device but I just got one of these
 on sale (new model out) for $220 and I think it's the most useful all-round
 cheap server box I've ever seen. Some people have it running 16 GB ram and
 I've got mine booting off an SSD via external eSATA. Very well built with 2
 x half height PCI slots (4 x eth port card?). Only missing USB3 ports and
 hot-swap drive space. And, very quiet with just an SSD.

I'd be very interested to know how fast it could do packet header captures.

Line rate (gigE) would be good. 

Does it do BQL? (what is the onboard ethernet chips)

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