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Novarq Tactical-1000 Support

Posted Updated
By Joachim Wiberg
1 min read

We said “stay tuned” at the end of the Laguna post. Here it is: the Novarq Tactical-1000, the first product built on the Microchip LAN969x family to run Infix. Supported from the v26.09 release, as a Tier 1 board from day one.

Figure 1: Novarq Tactical-1000, front panel and with the lid off. Photos: Novarq.

Hardware

Built on the Laguna reference design, in a compact enclosure:

  • LAN9696TSN, the TSN variant of the family, one Cortex-A53 at 1 GHz
  • 2 GiB DDR4, 16 GB eMMC, QSPI NOR flash
  • 24 x 1 GbE copper, 4 x 10 GbE SFP+, 1 x 1 GbE management port
  • USB-C serial console

The ports come up as e1 to e24, e25 to e28 for the SFP+ cages, and mgmt, matching the labels on the front panel. The board README has the full port map and the LED assignment.

Support Status

The switch core uses the same driver as the Laguna EVB, so bridging and VLANs are offloaded to hardware on all 29 ports. Infix runs from eMMC with A/B slots, so upgrades are atomic with a fallback to the previous image, and unattended updates work like on any other board.

In progress: TSN support, e.g., time aware shaping, CBS, and PSFP.

Getting Started

Use the Novarq U-Boot to netboot Infix once, then install to eMMC from the running system. The Netboot HowTo covers the DHCP and TFTP side, and the board README walks you through the rest.

From there on the unit upgrades like any other Infix system.

Tier 1

The Tactical-1000 is part of the default aarch64 build since v26.09, and it is currently being added to our regression test system.

Figure 2: Just unpacked, next to a couple of tiny BPi-R3 routers. Photo: J. Wiberg.

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