WR Switch firmware v5.0 released

White Rabbit Switch - Software

The new stable release v5.0 of the WR Switch firmware comes this year as a Christmas present. As always, you can find all the links to download the firmware binaries and manuals on our release wiki page

Main features and fixes include:

  • Updated Buildroot 2016.02
  • Updated Linux kernel 3.16.38
  • Fixes to the SNMP support preventing it from crashing or not updating objects
  • Changing WR interfaces enumeration in Linux (wri1..18 instead of wr0..17) to match the ports enumeration on the front panel
  • 64-bit Tx/Rx frame counters
  • Verification of firmware checksum before updating
  • VLANs configuration in the central dot-config file
  • make menuconfig on the switch to facilitate modification of a local dot-config file
  • New timing role none to disable PTP on selected ports
  • More verbose Syslog messages in case of errors
  • new wr_mon tool - with improvements for reporting VLANs and synchronization peer
  • User-defined boot script execution for all exotic setups currently not possible with standard configuration mechanisms
  • Tools for reading and writing SFP EEPROMs
  • Advanced RTU configurations in dot-config
  • Re-written, more efficient multiport linked list in the switching core
  • Added bandwidth throttling HDL module to prevent CPU from being flooded with traffic from WR ports
  • Additional frames counter for traffic originated from Linux to WR ports
  • Improved RTU forwarding decisions to save resources and not forward Ethernet frames to ports that are down
  • White Rabbit Switch: Failures and Diagnostics - document that lists various errors that the switch may report and tries to propose possible problems that caused the Error and actions that should be taken.

You can find a list of the main features and bugfixes in the wiki pages for two subprojects:

For the full list of solved issues please check:

We also advise you to read the two FAQ items “[1]":https://www.ohwr.org/project/white-rabbit/wikis/FAQswitch#Q-When-upgrading-the-4x-switch-to-v50-I-see-an-error-wrbinsdb-read-cant-load-library-libmso1 “[2]":https://www.ohwr.org/project/white-rabbit/wikis/FAQswitch#Q-After-upgrade-a-switch-to-firmware-v50-it-does-not-boot-via-NFS describing minor issues you might experience when upgrading to v5.0.

Thank you for all the bug reports and contributions. As always, we encourage you to try this fresh release on your switches.

Greg Daniluk, Adam Wujek