Returning to the Valley from SF, feeling mostly quite tired (in a generally good way).

[winterschon@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

Returning to the Valley from SF, feeling mostly quite tired (in a generally good way). Will soon depart, then work, then sometime in the evening decided whether to install a MikroTik CCR2004-1G-2XS-PCIe, or a Mellanox CX-5 2x25G (OCP v2 form factor) mounted on a PCIe converter card. 🤔

Ok, suppose it's time to get ready.

#homelab #SF #networking #linux #freebsd #engineering #nvidia #mellanox #mikrotik

[mrhamel@calckey.club]

@winterschon@mastodon.bsd.cafe My concern with the Mikrotik PCI-E card is the lack of a switch chip, meaning the CPU can very easily eat into the line rate potential for traffic forwarding. That's why it never has caught on with a regular DPU / Smart NIC, in my book.

[winterschon@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@mrhamel Agreed, it's certainly not a real DPU and it can't compete with any of the usual ones; at ~1/10th the cost of most Bluefields it's not capable of doing so. Re: switch chip, yep I wish it had one, so it's mostly useful for routing and as a set of static interfaces when not actively running L3 services. Odd little device and an interesting product experiment for their engineering teams.