The DENT project is a project from the Linux Foundation which aims at utilizing the Linux Kernel, Switchdev, and other Linux based projects as the basis for building a new standardized network operating system without abstractions or overhead.
Recently, Bootlin collaborated with the DENT project to work on a specific topic: extending the Linux kernel NVMEM subsystem to be able to support the ONIE TLV storage format which is used on ONIE-compliant network equipment to store in an EEPROM various information about the device: serial number, model, MAC addresses, and more.
This work, lead by Bootlin engineer Miquèl Raynal has now landed in Linux 6.4 as the drivers/nvmem/layouts/onie-tlv.c driver, together with the underlying new NVMEM layout infrastructure, which Miquèl helped to upstream in collaboration with Michael Walle.
We have written and published a longer blog post on the DENT website to explain the motivation for this effort and the results.
