Netonix Forums

I'm curious. Of course maybe its proprietary company secret and I would respect that but, are the Netonix switches powered by entirely custom firmware or is it based on some pre-existing package?

Stephen

When you make a switch you purchase the switch core or SOC from a company like Vitesse or in the case of Ubiquiti Broadcom.

The switching itself is a function of the core and the manufacturer has that firmware pre-loaded and or with the ability to do do Hot-Fix loads at boot with the driver.

What we write is the UI. This is why if you have linux shell access like with our switch you only see one interface because that is the way we see it. This is the interface we use to communicate with the core.

Now there are control programs for things like LACP, RSTP, Loop Protection and such which require constant communications with the core to control the state of things but the dirty low level packet exchanges are handled by the core itself and that code is written by the manufacturer. Switch cores are not a single CPU but rather dedicate hardware for doing specific tasks within the core.

So like UBNT our UI is proprietary and our intellectual property. Some of the control modules like I spoke of LACP and such which are based on 802 standards are provided by Vitesse but we may or may not modify those modules based on our needs.