NVIDIA Mellanox SN4800 Modular Switch Support Prepared For Linux 5.19

There are many networking changes already building up in "net-next" ahead of the Linux 5.19 kernel cycle kicking off this summer. Merged yesterday is support within the Mellanox Ethernet "mlxsw" kernel driver for supporting the NVIDIA Mellanox SN4800 modular switch.

Nearly three thousand lines of code was merged yesterday into the Mellanox kernel driver for introducing support for modular switch systems and bringing up support for the NVIDIA Mellanox SN4800 modular switch.The SN4800 has eight slots for accommodating different line cards as replaceable PHY modules. The line cards to be supported include the likes of 16x 100GbE, 8x200GbE, or 4x 400GbE configurations with other types of line cards to be added later.

NVIDIA comparison of the different SN4000 switches.

The SN4800 is the highest-end model within NVIDIA's Spectrum-3 based SN4000 Ethernet switch line-up and is rated for a maximum throughput of 12.8Tb/s and 8.4Bpps total packets per second.

As part of this merge is introducing the devlink-linecard mechanism for interfacing with these detachable PHY modules / line cards via the devlink command.

More details on this big SN4800 / Mellanox Line Card support via this merge request ahead of the Linux 5.19 merge window opening in late May and then the stable v5.19 release later in the summer.