It’s a 52-port data center switch — 48 ten-gig ports and four forties, built to move 1.28 Tbps at full line rate: 960 million packets a second, cut-through latency around a microsecond. None of that aged. Everything around it was declared dead, though. The manufacturer discontinued the hardware — officially end-of-life in 2016. And every operating system it could run, all from the Linux 3.2 era, reached end-of-life too, until there was nothing left to buy and nothing left to install that anyone still supported. Hardware EOL. Software EOL. The silicon never got the memo.
We gave it a different life. EdgeNOS — an open network OS we wrote from scratch — started it on Linux 5.10, and from there we’ve been climbing the LTS ladder: 5.10 to 5.15, then 5.15 to 6.1 across a major version (the genuinely hard jump). It landed: 6.1.175 LTS, security-maintained into 2027, all 52 ports up and forwarding at full line rate in hardware, OSPF neighbors Full, 0% loss to the upstream Nexus — on both A/B slots with automatic rollback, on live hardware.
And it doesn’t stop here. The box is no longer frozen in time; it upgrades like any Linux box now. 6.6 is the next rung, then 6.12 — we re-check that 32-bit PowerPC still builds and boots at each step (that’s the real ceiling), and as long as it does, this switch keeps moving forward with the rest of Linux.
From a 2012-era kernel left for dead to a current one that keeps climbing — still pushing packets at line rate. “End of life,” for both the hardware and the software, was a business decision. It was never a measure of what the silicon can still do. Take the OS into your own hands, and the clock starts running forward again.
More soon.