Microchip Laguna Support

Twenty-eight ports, one lonely Cortex-A53, and a switch core that does TSN + FRER and HSR/PRP in hardware. Say hello to Microchip Laguna, the LAN969x family, now supported in Infix via the EV23X71A evaluation board!

Figure 1: Microchip EV23X71A, a.k.a. the Laguna EVB. Twenty-four RJ45s and four SFP+ cages along the bottom edge.

Hardware

The EVB is a big, green, no-nonsense board built around a LAN9696RED, the 60 Gbps member of the family, where RED stands for hardware RedBox support (HSR/PRP). As eval boards usually go, Microchip have crammed all the things into this one, but the SoC comes in many variants. Common to all of them is the built-in single Cortex-A53 @ 1 GHz. The EVB also has 1 GiB DDR4, 4 GiB eMMC, and 2 MiB QSPI NOR flash. The latter is interesting if you want to try out Microchip’s VelocityDRIVE, have a look at it!

The many ports are what you came for:

• 24 x 1 GbE copper, six QSGMII quad PHYs in a neat row
• 4 x 10 GbE SFP+
• 1 x 1 GbE RGMII management port

It is the smaller sibling of the SparX-5i, and the same Linux sparx5 switchdev driver takes care of both, so everything you already know about bridging and VLANs in Infix works just as expected, all fully offloaded to the switch core, no CPU cycles involved.

Support Status

The EVB starts out as Tier 3 in Infix, keeping the SparX-5i company. That sounds modest, and it is, but only because an evaluation board rarely ends up in a rack. What works today:

• switch core and SerDes, all 29 ports, with switchdev offload
• eMMC, I²C (including the SFP mux), SPI, and USB host
• watchdog, temperature sensor, status and SFP LEDs
• our own boot chain, from BL2 all the way to an A/B slot on the eMMC

That last bullet deserves a moment. The U-Boot the board ships with cannot boot Infix from eMMC, so we built our own FIP (Trusted Firmware + U-Boot) from Microchip’s trees. Along the way we tripped over a boot ROM erratum that made roughly one build in a hundred fail to authenticate, which was great fun to track down. The whole story is in the board README.

Not there yet: TSN queueing (time aware shaping, PSFP) and HSR/PRP offload. The hardware is more than ready, it’s our turn now.

Getting Started

Laguna support ships with the upcoming v26.09 release, and until then in the latest builds. The bootloader is built with laguna_boot_defconfig and the rest is the standard aarch64 image, combined for eMMC using utils/mkimage.sh. The board README walks you through it all: boot mode strapping, installing the FIP, netbooting, and (just in case) debricking.

Coming Soon: Novarq Tactical-1000

Why all this effort on an EVB? Because it is the reference design for real products, and the first one is already on the bench. The Novarq Tactical-1000 is basically a cut-down Laguna EVB in a box: same 24 + 4 + 1 port layout, a LAN9696TSN, 2 GiB RAM, and a CPU fan that looks suspiciously like it was borrowed from a Raspberry Pi 5.

Figure 2: Novarq Tactical-1000, the business end. Photo: Novarq.

This one is going straight to Tier 1, i.e., included in the default builds and tested in our regression test system.
Stay tuned!