This is the development and community site of the Liberouter project.

The original aim of the Liberouter project was the development of a multigigabit IPv6 and IPv4 PC-based router with an open design and software and firmware being completely open-source. In order to speed-up the forwarding and filtering functions, we developed a hardware accelerator card, COMBO6, which utilises the flexible technology of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). Thanks to its open-ended design, COMBO6 soon found other interesting applications, so far mainly in the networking area. Click the tabs under "Projects" to learn more about the individual projects.

If you are interested in obtaining our hardware, go to the "Card availability" page.

Recent news:

[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

[7 Feb 2009] Netopeer

Our C implementation of the NETCONF protocol, named Netopeer, is now hosted at Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/netopeer/. The software is available under the terms of the (new) BSD licence. We use it for remote configuration of the Liberouter devices. Discussion about future development will take place in the mailing list netopeer@liberouter.org.

[20 Nov 2008] New 10 Gbps interface card

Our hardware guru Štěpán Friedl recently reported success in activating the new 10-gig interface card COMBOI-10G2. This card completes the first phase of development of the new COMBOv2 family - its motherboard COMBO-LXT and interface cards 4x1Gbps and 2x10Gbps are now operational. The holy grail for the next phase is now of course the 40 Gbps interface card.

COMBOI-10G2 is by design a relatively simple card containing two cages for standard XFP transceivers (copper, single- or multimode fibre or CWDM) an ID chip and several temperature sensors.

Our short term goal is to port the NETCOPE framework to the COMBOv2 cards, which will make our NETCOPE-based applications - FlowMon (IP flow monitoring) and NIFIC (hardware packet filtration) - immediately available for COMBOv2.

News archive