The part about stealing lanes seems even more interesting. Would love to see a writeup on just that!
geerlingguy•1mo ago
I got to talk to Patrick about this and also someone who was working on the customized connectors.
They had to make some Gen 5-capable custom adapters that plugged into one of the front-of-chassis NVMe bay connectors (thus disabling that bank of 4 drive bays), and then routed that signal all the way back to the rear, using Nvidia's custom edge plug on the card.
Normally, if you're deploying the 800 Gbps ConnectX-8 cards, you have the card in one slot, then a little adapter board right next to it, with a cable NVIDIA makes. But for this, it had to be fully custom.
Would be neat to hear more from STH how that cable was made exactly, because it seems like hand-building PCIe cables can be a bit tricky!
FeistySkink•1mo ago
I don't think this should be promoted as coming with OpenWrt preconfigured. This device has no vanilla OpenWrt support, and is unlikely if it will ever have it, considering they seem to be using a proprietary SDK with hardware offload that requires binary blobs with a separate license. Which means you're only getting support as long as they are willing to maintain their fork. So selling this as if it has an OpenWrt support out of the box is deceptive, especially considering the price tag. This is akin to all those SBC advertising Linux support, but then coming with an outdated kernel with no source.
BobbyTables2•1mo ago
geerlingguy•1mo ago
They had to make some Gen 5-capable custom adapters that plugged into one of the front-of-chassis NVMe bay connectors (thus disabling that bank of 4 drive bays), and then routed that signal all the way back to the rear, using Nvidia's custom edge plug on the card.
Normally, if you're deploying the 800 Gbps ConnectX-8 cards, you have the card in one slot, then a little adapter board right next to it, with a cable NVIDIA makes. But for this, it had to be fully custom.
Would be neat to hear more from STH how that cable was made exactly, because it seems like hand-building PCIe cables can be a bit tricky!