Best VSDL modem-router to target?

[Mathew McBride]

Hi David,

On Mon, Jan 10, 2022, at 11:46 AM, David Woodhouse wrote:
[snip]
> > Our VDSL card is just a Lantiq/MaxLinear GRX gateway with an Ethernet
> > uplink to host. 
> 
> Is that a GRX300, with VRX318?
It's a GRX300 + VRX518.

> Wonder what it would take to get OpenWrt running directly on it :)
Probably not very hard to get something more recent on it, especially with DSA now supporting the ethernet switch/GSWIP.

> > It's not possible to construct a something that functions like the
> > Solos/Geos with modern DSL chipsets.
> 
> Is it not possible to have a VRX518 transceiver alone on a PCIe card?
> Is it that you can't *get* them as discrete PCIe devices, or that they
> wouldn't work like that?
A VRX518 connected directly to the host is the "dream", but we couldn't justify the effort (yet) to figure out how to get it working on a non-GRX platform.

(We also have to be careful, when VDSL vectoring is involved then CPE's need to be "well behaved" or the operator might block your device. At least when it's running the same code as the reference design, I can escalate back to the vendor)

It won't be as nice as the Solos where we could use the FPGA and firmware to hide the ugly parts of the vendors DSL stack.

> > (Except maybe if you can get the VRX PCIe phys working on plain
> > OpenWrt. I believe others have tried and not succeeded yet)
> 
> We do have native VRX200 support, and there's progress on VRX518 too,
> which looks like it's working for many users although it isn't merged
> yet.
> 
> While we dream about that, though, having the VDSL bridged to Ethernet
> by an internal "black box" PCIe device instead of having to use an
> external modem is still a big win.
> 
> Are your VDSL cards available for purchase? I'm tempted to go buy a
> Ten64 right now and see if I can help with upstreaming the OpenWrt
> support, if I can get a VDSL card too. 
There are two variants of our VDSL card: one with an RGMII uplink (proprietary) for our older LS1043 board, and one with a PCIe (Intel i210) uplink. The PCIe one isn't in production yet, though might be later this year.

Officially we don't sell them to the public as xDSL hardware tends to require a lot of integration support from our side, but if you ask very nicely we occasionally make exceptions.

Upstream OpenWrt for Ten64 isn't far away, I just need to respin our current tree and hopefully I'll do a pull request this week.
https://gitlab.com/traversetech/ls1088firmware/openwrt/-/commits/owrt_master_2021-12-10
This in the form of a generic "arm64" target which will work on other modern ARM machines with EFI support.

Regards,
Matt