Hi everyone!
I’ve been working on a new OpenWrt 25.12-based BMC firmware for the Mixtile Cluster Box, along with OpenMIOP v0.6.0, which enables high-speed networking between Blade 3 nodes over PCIe.
Both have been tested on my 4-node Blade 3 cluster running Talos Linux, Kubernetes, and Cozystack.
New OpenWrt BMC Firmware
The firmware includes a redesigned web UI with:
- Node management — power control and reboot for all four Blade 3 nodes.
- Web Serial Console — connect to each node directly from your browser, including bootloader access.
- Logs & Diagnostics — view BMC logs and troubleshoot issues.
- Network Management — configure networking and OpenWrt services.
- Firmware Management — manage and update the BMC firmware.
OpenMIOP v0.6.0 — Networking over PCIe
OpenMIOP creates a standard Linux network interface (omi0) over the internal ASM2824 PCIe switch, allowing Blade 3 nodes to communicate without an external Ethernet switch.
Performance improvements in v0.6.0:
- Single TCP flow: 7.8–8.0 Gbit/s
- Four parallel flows: up to 11.3 Gbit/s
- Kubernetes pod-to-pod: up to 8.6 Gbit/s
- TCP/UDP checksum offloading
- Optimized TX processing on Cortex-A76 cores
- Backward compatibility with v0.5 nodes
Stability Tests
The driver passed extensive testing:
- 4 GiB bidirectional transfers with integrity verification.
- 200,000 UDP datagrams with hash validation.
- 2 GiB Kubernetes pod-to-pod transfers.
- 1-hour continuous stress test.
- 97 × 512 MiB HTTP downloads through the BMC gateway (~48.5 GiB).
- Mixed v0.5/v0.6 communication and peer reboot recovery.
Results: No BMC crashes, no new driver errors, no data corruption, and zero DRBD out-of-sync.
Source Code
OpenWrt BMC Firmware:
OpenMIOP v0.6.0:
The new OpenWrt firmware release is coming today!
Feedback and testing from other Cluster Box owners are welcome!
