This is the development and community site of the "Programmable Hardware" activity, for historical reasons also known as "Liberouter". It is a part of research intent MSM6383917201 carried out by CESNET. The activity focuses on the development of hardware-accelerated network applications for high-speed networks. Our development efforts address specialized PCI cards with programmable chips (FPGA), their firmware, device drivers and other system software.
Our previous research prototypes have been a basis for several commercial products that are now offerred by our partner company INVEA-TECH.
For information about the individual applications see the Projects page or click the tabs on the left.
Recent news:
[4 Nov 2009] Flexible FlowMon 1.0.0 released
The very first package of Flexible FlowMon was released. See www.liberouter.org/fflowmon for more details.
[4 Aug 2009] NetCOPE 1.0.0 Release Candidate 2
Testing of NetCOPE 1.0.0 package is starting. This is the first release of the development platform for COMBOv2 cards.
Main features of this package:
- Complete development platform for Hardware-Software codesign of hardware-accelerated applications on the COMBOv2 cards.
- Supports COMBO-LXT base cards with Virtex5 LX110T and LX155T FPGAs.
- Supports COMBOI-10G2 and COMBOI-1G4 interface cards.
- Supports ISE 10.1.03.
- The first example of firmware is the Network Interface Card with fast szedata2 and PCAP interfaces.
- Linux kernel modules and a set of software debugging and development tools.
[24 April 2009] FlowMon-1.5.0 released
The FlowMon 1.5.0 package is available for download. This is the last FlowMon package release closing development of the FlowMon Probe. Now, we are working on Flexible FlowMon that vitally improves original FlowMon Probe concept.
Changes in this release include:
- Netopeer as a system of remote configuration was vitally improved including using new more detailed configuration scheme or using D-Bus for internal communication
- VLAN support in exporters added
- improvements in COMBO-2XFP2 card with 10GE interfaces - controlling phyters via I2C, improvements leading to the rise of maximal probe throughput (on long packets) to the 10Gbps
- many optimalizations, improvements and bugfixes in firmware, tools and drivers
- support for COMBO-2XFP addon cards terminated
For more information see FlowMon probe homepage, FlowMon portal, FlowMon Handbook Readme, Release Notes, Errata.
[23 Mar 2009] Presentation of NetCOPE platform at Xilinx Academic
NetCOPE platform was presented at Xilinx Academic Forum in San Jose, California, USA on 25/02/2009. The presentation described the basic scope of system architecture of designed platform for rapid development of network applications based on the connection of a processor and an acceleration card. The talk drew attention of many academic researchers.
The presentation is available here:
http://www.liberouter.org/docs/2009-02-25-NetCOPE-Xilinx-Academic-Forum.pdf
[5 Mar 2009] NetFPGA tutorial
Martin Zadnik led the flow monitoring part of the newest iteration of NetFPGA tutorial which took place at Seoul National University, Korea. The tutorial was attended by 80 researchers and students.
More information is available here:
http://fif.kr/netfpga/doku.php?id=NetFPGA%20Tutorial
News archive
