Weird behavior with XikeStor 10Gb SFP+ switches

[cesarinpillin]

Well, I believe you can load whatever needed, but just compensate.
"Advanced" folks do recommend to trash the original power brick anyways and get a new good one matching 2A
I was going to use a pair of these to fit into 1U with the modified switch case:

View attachment 46707

and 2 x 0.13A extra, so 3A power supply should be enough

Were you able to make that modified case? Id love to take it to a spin now that I have a 3d printer.

 

[luckylinux]

Anyone tried the new RC1 or RC2 on their XikeStor SKS8300-8X or ONTi ONT-S508CL-8S ?
Wondering whether they eventually fixed anything - jumbo, LAG, etc.

OpenWrt Firmware Selector

firmware-selector.openwrt.org

Nope.

Since last time I got stuck with owut Upgrade and it was a Mess of Libraries I had to fix manually (see what ldd returned, then do a ln -s for all those missing Library links, since they basically all had the wrong Names) I kinda let it be for now.

Also because apparently owut didn't support apk very well at the Time.

You can try looking for it yourself, I couldn't find anything, similar story looking for RTL930x or RTL9303 + Jumbo, Xikestor + LACP or a mix of those Terms:

Issues · openwrt/openwrt

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Latest Changelogs:

https://openwrt.org/releases/25.12/changelog-25.12.0-rc1

There is quite a bit in the RC1 "Release", nothing of which about LACP/LAGG/Jumbo Frames though.

Maybe the most exciting (from my point of View at least) is SMP (multi thread Support):

realtek: rtl930x: enable SMP - openwrt - OpenWrt Source Repository

git.openwrt.org

I didn't see anything else that I would say as super-exciting since most of the Stuff I care about works. But then again, I don't know if the Changelog is made w.r.t. the latest Stable (i.e. EVERYTHING is new) or if it's made w.r.t. some SNAPSHOT where OpenWRT was already running on those Switches.

Nothing new in RC2 apparently .

Sure you could say I'm easy to please . I basically just want VLANs to work and a bit more than that, but to be honest while I always wanted to do LACP, in real Life I never managed to get it implemented . Jumbo Frames I never needed thus far.

In my view still the advantages of running an Open Source Firmware on the Device instead of a potentially backdoored Chinese (or American/Russian/...) one far outweight the Inconvenience .

 

[novegg4]

Were you able to make that modified case? Id love to take it to a spin now that I have a 3d printer.

Ended up ordering fully fabricated panel from a local 3D print enthusiast - provided all dimensions and participated in few check-ups
and paid something like $15 or so
Folks got quite excited and listed on local CL - however no idea whether it was as successful trade or no, at least I can't see the listing anymore.

 

[cesarinpillin]

Ended up ordering fully fabricated panel from a local 3D print enthusiast - provided all dimensions and participated in few check-ups
and paid something like $15 or so
Folks got quite excited and listed on local CL - however no idea whether it was as successful trade or no, at least I can't see the listing anymore.

dang, would have loved to get the 3d STL file and print it myself now that I have a 3d printer.

 

[novegg4]

Anyone tried the new release on SKS8300-8X ?
25.12 is out
Wondering whether it is doable via upgrade from snapshot or RCx, or it must be done through re-flashing to OEM firmware first.
luckylinux - it would be great to know what you suggest

 

[luckylinux]

Well "common knowledge" assumes everybody has it. Just like "common sense" for that matter. Turns out it's not a thing .

Jokes aside,for installing OpenWRT there is the official wiki as well as my "tutorial" (2 Posts) mentioned here:

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/weird-behavior-with-xikestor-10gb-sfp-switches.44041/page-2#post-464294

What are "Channels" exactly for Ethernet ?

VLANs should work as expected. LACP I don't believe it works at all, I didn't try it. And I don't know if with stock Firmware it works either.

Not sure what these really implements:

realtek: dsa: Add non-primary LAG ports to port matrix by ecsv · Pull Request #20729 · openwrt/openwrt

If ports of a RTL93xx switch are not added to a port matrix then they are not used for the link aggregation. As result, communication will then just break on non-primary interfaces. This can be rep...

github.com

realtek: rtl93xx: Send per port packets on physical port by ecsv · Pull Request #20728 · openwrt/openwrt

If link aggregation with LACP is activated, we must send out the LACP packets on the physical port and not on a logic port. Otherwise, the per port packets might be (re-balanced) between the differ...

github.com

This mentions jumbo frames, but it's a very old kernel mixing rtl93xx PR with mentions about rtl83xx:

Fix rtl930x VLAN, LEDs and status by 0xharshal · Pull Request #14221 · openwrt/openwrt

Fix VLAN behaviour support jumbo frames by default enable 2.5 gig for rtl930x Fix led behaviour Fix detection of current port status Expose register and phy_mmd register r/w in sysfs to aid develop...

github.com

I'd say there is basically ZERO (or close to) support for LACP or LAGG

Pull requests · openwrt/openwrt

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Pull requests · openwrt/openwrt

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Not sure about what of these is true link aggregation (probably not much):

Pull requests · openwrt/openwrt

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Xikestor SKS8300-8X stock Chinese Firmware claims to support LACP, according to Manufacturer Website.

Whether that's true or not is another Matter.

I'm not entirely sure why OpenWRT would be so far behind. On one hand, there is probably some NDA / confidential information. On the other IIRC the "stock firmware" that these were running was basically just the manufacturer reference design / example code, so it shouldn't be so hard to implement.

About SFP+ Modules I think one of the most knowleageable people around here is @blunden.

I think I bought 3pcs of the 30m Variant here:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007130620541.html

I cannot remember however if this was mostly targeted towards 2,5gbps (and maybe 5gbps) or if it could also do 10gbps without glowing bright red, due to the power consumption of the module.

However, if you want higher bandwidth, I wonder if going with a used Mellanox SX6036 or similar would be a better Idea. With the Fans tuned down I think the Idle Power Consumption would be around 35W-40W or something like that. That is more than the 10W or so of the Xikestor, but it's also many more Ports (40gbe or 56gbe with some special mellanox cables), with possibility for breakout to 4x10gbe on some ports. I don't know if the SX6036 supports LACP either though. It would have at least a 40gbe upstream connection though ...

EDIT 1: price wise the ONTI 8 port x 10gbe (85-90 EUR - ish to Europe) should be approximatively the same as a used Mellanox SX6036 off eBay if bought from the US (approx. 100 USD plus shipping to Europe), possibly a bit less for the ONTI, but you get 8x10gbe instead of 36x40gbe/56gbps infiniband.

 

[novegg4]

Thank you for the great recap.
I was mistakenly under impression that RC5 is over because there is another entry for 25.12.0 on SKS download page:

 

[novegg4]

Definitely sounds like 25.12.0 is still RC#-whatever
Wondering whether a "release" status eventually will mean "all issues sorted out"

 

[Shonk]

Anyone have a Horaco/GoodTop ZX310S-8T2XS im 99% sure its a managed Maxlinear MXL86282S

I currently have a XikeStor MXL86282C SKS1200-8GPY2X unmanaged
havnt had any issues with it at all just fancy the managed version

was £45 after vouchers so decided to order it

If so anyone have any pcb pictures and such

 

[luckylinux]

That are multiple reasons why making it work on OpenWrt is a lot of hard work. The Realtek SDK code for a lot of these switch chips is based on the ancient 3.18 Linux kernel. OpenWrt is porting it to the 6.12 and soon 6.18 kernels. Let's just say there have been a few changes since then.

I see . I saw a comment in open of the Pull Requests I believe about Kernel 6,18 and they were like ... "This looks quite simple compared to what we had to do in the Past". Cannot remember what it was exactly about though .

Note that 10GBASE-T transceivers aren't necessarily officially supported in all devices, so you usually want them to be programmed to appear as 10GBASE-SR fiber transceivers for maximum compatibility.

If you can, using DACs or fiber is definitely preferred in SFP+ devices.

It's been a while since I last did the initial flashing on these Devices, but I'm pretty sure I had to change Ports between when I did the OpenWRT InitramFS boot via tftp and when I did the flashing of the Sysupgrade Image. That or change from SFP+ Transceiver to/from DAC. It's been a while though.

 

[Snoddas1099]

Hi

I Bought a ONTI 10GBit switch. It came with very strange fw. and web gui is labeled goodtop



And firmware is probably wrong aswell, only shows 6 ports and branded in gui GT-ST024M
Label sticker says ONTI CNT-508CL-8S.



Opened it up to see inside. All looks ok and like my other Xikestor SKS8300-8x.

Now to the question: Anyone have a link to a firmware that work on this? So I can enable all 8ports.
I have the old fw for the Xikestor SKS8300-8x.

Software Version	V300SP10240912
BootRom Version	V2.00
Firmware Compile Date	2024-09-12 15:46:39

Just found this.

下载中心

seekswan.com

Maybe it will work?


UPDATE:

Well this ended happy



Must say. This time I was pretty sure I was scammed...

 

[luckylinux]

And honestly, I had so much coupons, the Onti was just 61€ on AliExpress.

What ? You cannot use more than one Coupon at the Time ...

My infrastructure, right, now relies highly on LACP channels to compensate the 1Gbit limit, but if I change, I can get rid of all of them, besides the Channel to my NAS (has just 2x 1Gbit interfaces).

And since LACP really gave me some benefits there, I would like to stay with that.

This is a 10gbps Switch. Which 1gbps Limit are you talking about exactly ? LACP will only help with multiple parallel Connections anyways. That should be supported by both NFS and Samba nowadays though.

You'll be better off upgrading to 5gbps or 10gbps rather than trying to get 2x1gbps to work.

Unless you mean having a Downlink e.g. 24x1gbps Switch increasing its "Bandwidth" in which case maybe. I'd still say that upgrading to 10gbps is easier than multiple Connections in parallel though.

 

[Shonk]

My GoodTop ZX310S-8T2XS Came earlier
Its a Maxlinear MXL86282S made by Hongrui

It came with firmware 1.0.6 the heatsink is small but wasnt quite as bad as in person but i heatsinked it into the case
with 1 x 1.0mm + 1 x 0.8mm copper slab and 0.1mm heat tape then a bit of paste on top
also added 7 x stacks of pads under the board 4 under sfp+ 3 around soc for extra transfer

seems solid enough and is very small compared to my xikestor unmanaged maxlinear (less than half the size)



View attachment 2.jpg

 

[luckylinux]

Anyone tried the new release on SKS8300-8X ?
25.12 is out
Wondering whether it is doable via upgrade from snapshot or RCx, or it must be done through re-flashing to OEM firmware first.
luckylinux - it would be great to know what you suggest

[OpenWrt Wiki] OpenWrt 25.12

openwrt.org

Releases · openwrt/openwrt

This repository is a mirror of https://git.openwrt.org/openwrt/openwrt.git It is for reference only and is not active for check-ins. We will continue to accept Pull Requests here. They will be mer...

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Version 25.12 Series is still on rc5.

Given the Issues with breakages I had on SNAPSHOT, I'd say that most likely you need to flash using sysupgrade, possibly resetting the Configuration (you should be able to re-import it from the GUI once flashed). Not sure if that is required though.

Last time I tried owut was broken on SNAPSHOT. It should work fine after upgrading though.

I can give it a quick try on a non-production Version this Evening .

 

[luckylinux]

Anyone tried the new release on SKS8300-8X ?
25.12 is out
Wondering whether it is doable via upgrade from snapshot or RCx, or it must be done through re-flashing to OEM firmware first.
luckylinux - it would be great to know what you suggest

Short-ish Summary.

Be ready with the Serial Console & keep it connected
I feel like I needed the Serial Console after the Upgrade's reboot to press the Enter Key to let the Boot Process continue. Maybe I wasn't patient enough. The boot can easily take 3-5 Minutes. After that, I issued reboot and it came back on its own (no need to press ENTER key again). YMMV. Maybe if you have more patience it will come up on its own also the first Time, not sure.

The good
It boots and I can access the GUI .

Configuration is preserved.

The so-so
I am getting logs of Messages like this in the Serial Console ("spontaneous" Output), logread and dmesg.

switch: received packet on lan4 with own address as source address (addr:d2:aa:XX:XX:XX:XX, vlan:1)

Not sure why that is happening. Only one Port of this Switch is attached to anything. The Upstream Switch is not logging anything. STP is enabled on both Switches. Both seem to have all interfaces go into promiscuous Mode (according to the Logs), even though .... it should be disabled (according to the WebGUI).

Process

# Save Packages List
root@OpenWrt:~# apk list --quiet -u | awk '{print $1}' > /tmp/installed_packages.txt

# Save Standard Packages (from https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/?version=25.12.0&target=realtek%2Frtl930x&id=xikestor_sks8300-8x)
echo "apk-mbedtls base-files ca-bundle dropbear ethtool firewall4 fstools kmod-gpio-button-hotplug libc libgcc libustream-mbedtls logd mtd netifd odhcp6c procd-ujail uboot-envtools uci uclient-fetch urandom-seed urngd luci" | sed -E "s| |\n|g" > /tmp/standard_packages.txt

# Combine Packages List
root@OpenWrt:/tmp# cat /tmp/installed_packages.txt /tmp/standard_packages.txt > /tmp/all_packages.txt

# Get Unique Packages List, exclude versioned Items (due to SNAPSHOT) to prevent breakages
root@OpenWrt:~# cat /tmp/all_packages.txt | sort | uniq | grep -Ev "202[0-9]" | tr '\n' ' '

# Get new Firmware
root@OpenWrt:/tmp# wget https://sysupgrade.openwrt.org/store/02a3de3816627a6ee14126079edfac115191b45c30bdf7cc69ae45776450c27e/openwrt-25.12.0-1e68c0d34491-realtek-rtl930x-xikestor_sks8300-8x-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin -O /tmp/openwrt-25.12.0-1e68c0d34491-realtek-rtl930x-xikestor_sks8300-8x-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin

# Clear Screen
root@OpenWrt:/tmp# clear

# Flash preserving Configuration (be verbose and  include in backup a list of current installed packages at /etc/backup/installed_packages.txt)
root@OpenWrt:/tmp# sysupgrade -v -k /tmp/openwrt-25.12.0-1e68c0d34491-realtek-rtl930x-xikestor_sks8300-8x-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin

Next Time we should be able to just use owut, it's just so much more convenient .

EDIT 1: my combined Packages List (for the download Link above), if interested

apk-mbedtls base-files busybox ca-bundle cgi-io dropbear ethtool firewall4 fstools fwtool getrandom jansson4 jshn jsonfilter kernel kmod-gpio-button-hotplug libatomic1 libc libcbor0 libevdev libgcc libgcc1 libiwinfo-data libmbedtls21 libncurses6 libnftnl11 libnl-tiny1 libopenssl3 libudebug libudev-zero libustream-mbedtls logd luci luci-app-firewall luci-app-package-manager luci-base luci-light luci-mod-admin-full luci-mod-network luci-mod-status luci-mod-system luci-proto-ipv6 luci-proto-ppp luci-ssl luci-theme-bootstrap mtd nano netifd nftables-json odhcp6c openssh-keygen openssh-server openssh-sftp-client openssh-sftp-server openwrt-keyring procd procd-seccomp procd-ujail rpcd rpcd-mod-file rpcd-mod-iwinfo rpcd-mod-ucode terminfo uboot-envtools ubox ubus ubusd uci uclient-fetch ucode ucode-mod-fs ucode-mod-math ucode-mod-ubus ucode-mod-uci uhttpd uhttpd-mod-ubus urandom-seed urngd usign

Firmware Builder Link:

OpenWrt Firmware Selector

firmware-selector.openwrt.org

 

[luckylinux]

Thank you for the great recap.
I was mistakenly under impression that RC5 is over because there is another entry for 25.12.0 on SKS download page:

View attachment 47915

Same, I took that version too for download ...

 

[luckylinux]

Thank you for the great recap.
I was mistakenly under impression that RC5 is over because there is another entry for 25.12.0 on SKS download page:

View attachment 47915

Seems like I had some weird MAC Address overlap using the defaults, not sure why.

Maybe it was already the Case before.

Could it be 2 "consecutive" MAC Address out of the Factory (on the Switch ASIC / Port) are "too close" to be deployed for 2 Switches on the same LAN ? Unsure.

See

ONTi ONT-S508CL-8S (XikeStor SKS8300-8X) latest SNAPSHOT breaks LUCI - lots of "symbol not found" Errors in logread · Issue #20626 · openwrt/openwrt

Describe the bug After installing the latest SNAPSHOT using OpenWRT Firmware Selector Webpage at Direct Link I get a lot of symbol not found Errors. Seems like one/several shared Library/Libraries ...

github.com

After reboot the log Spam Issue is fixed, but the MAC Address are getting initialized to yet another Random Value, instead of the one set in the Configuration .

EDIT 1: you need to manually change the MAC, then it seems to work.