kohlschuetter

Thank you! I had to stop digging at some point, but honestly I can't wait for someone to port Doom to a ONU.

Thank you! I hope you all have trusted vendors, and no-one gets bent over by the sudden flood of cheap SFP28 cables :-)

I was going from SFP+ to SFP28. Not sure about SFP to SFP28. But with that EEPROM change you could also try going from SFP to SFP+, just use different bandwidth values.

You could also try resoldering new/thicker Twinax wires to old SFP connectors and update the EEPROM. My soldering skills apparently aren't that great. If yours are or you have plenty of old connectors you should give that a try.

Thanks!

AUI: So that's what that port next to the BNC connector on the 3COM 3C509B was for! We've come a long way.

The new low-power Realtek chipsets will definitely push 10 GbE forward because the chipset won't be much more expensive to integrate and run than the 2.5Gbps packages.

It all comes down to performance per Watt, the availability of cheap switching gear, and the actual utility in an office / home environment.

For 10 Gbps, cabling can be an issue. Existing "RJ45"-style Cat 6 cables could still work, but maybe not all of them.

Higher speeds will most likely demand a switch to fiber (for anything longer than a few meters) or Twinax DAC (for inter-device connects). Since Wifi already provides higher speeds, one may be inclined to upgrade just for that (because at some point, Wireless becomes Wired, too).

That change comes with the complexity of running new cabling, fiber splicing, worrying about different connectors (SFP+, SFP28, SFP56, QSFP28, ...), incompatible transceiver certifications, vendor lock-in, etc. Not a problem in the datacenter, but try to explain this to a layman.

Lastly, without a faster pipe to the Internet, what can you do other than NAS and AI? The computers will still get faster chips but most folks won't be able to make use of the bandwidth because they're still stuck on 1Gbps Internet or less.

But that will change. Swiss Init7 has shown that 25GBps Internet at home is not only feasible but also affordable, and China seems to be adding lots of 10G, and fiber in general.

Fun times ahead.

For reference, I'm seeing pings from my Mac to my Linux boxes (Lenovo Tiny5) at well under 1ms, not much worse than between them directly. But yeah, your mileage may vary.

I got me one of these adapters (RTL8127AF TXA403, with SFP+ cage); I haven't properly benchmarked it yet.

There's no driver support on macOS, and for Linux you'd need a bleeding edge kernel. Just trying to physically connect it (along with a connected SFP28 transceiver) to my Mac's Thunderbolt port using an external PCIe-to-TB adapter, macmon tells me a power draw of around 4.3 W, so it's not significantly less for half the bandwidth, but the card doesn't get hot at all.

Be sure to test this adapter on iPad Pro, just for kicks (yes it works!)

Although I managed to panic the kernel a couple of times without the extra heatsinks on...