Beyond VLANs on managed switches

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hello all,

I'm very excited to see OpenWrt start supporting various managed switches with the introduction of DSA. For fun, I kicked the tires on a Netgear GS308T to only realize that effectively only VLAN functionality can be managed. I mean you lose all the port mirroring, LLDP, LAG, and other capabilities of the switch when migrating to OpenWrt from their stock firmware.

Wondering, am I missing something? Are these features supported or usable with low-level configuration changes?

If not, what's the value proposition of OpenWrt on managed switch hardware if it only supports VLAN management?

Are there plans going forward to support additional functionality? Or is this functionality too hardware specific?

Thanks,
Alex

2

It's possible, via tc/ iproute2, but the webinterface isn't really optimized for that yet (after all, most supported devices are routers with up to 4+1 ports, where that's less of a necessity). The DSA subsystem offers all these features, it's made with software defined switches in mind.

3

Port mirroring (easy use) was available in LuCI up until 19.07 but the function was removed in LuCi when DSA was introduced with 21.02.

4

For lldp you can use https://github.com/lldpd/lldpd

5

Wouldn't some of this be chipset specific? Wondering how much of the functionality offered by stock firmware UI's are really using these OS capabilities.

6

Any idea of how mirroring can be enabled via CLI if no longer available via LuCI?

7

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/future-of-dsa-port-mirroring/98200?u=flygarn12
A simple search often reveals the answer of most questions in this forum…

2 Likes
8

None, as so far all vendors were/are using proprietary (userspace) SDKs.