infix

Infix is an embedded Linux Network Operating System (NOS) based on Buildroot, Finit, ifupdown-ng, and sysrepo. Providing an easy-to-maintain and easy-to-port Open Source base for networked equipment.

See the GitHub Releases page for out pre-built images. The Latest Build has the bleeding edge images, if possible we recommend using a versioned release.

For customer specific builds of Infix, see your respective repository.

Infix has two main flavors, or defconfigs:

NETCONF: the default, managed using, e.g., the cli tool
Classic: built from $ARCH_classic_defconfig, more below

Both flavors have an admin user, which is allowed to log in from remote, password admin on standard builds. It is the recommended account to use for managing Infix. (The root account is currently also available, but will soon become a non-login account used only for running system services.)

NETCONF Mode

NETCONF is the primary reason Infix exists. Configuration of an Infix device can be done either remotely, using tools like netconf-client or netopeer2-cli, or locally using the cli tool.

Infix use sysrepo as the data store for NETCONF. A set of plugins configure the network, using iproute2, generate configuration files in /etc, and control the system daemons, e.g., enable DHCP client on an interface.

Classic Mode

Here it is up to the administrator to modify configuration files in /etc and control the system daemons using the initctl tool.

See the online help command for an introduction to the system.

Hybrid Mode

Since Infix is under heavy development, it does not yet have all bells and whistles in place, in particular in the default build. To that end it is possible to manually manage certain services that are not yet possible to configure using NETCONF.

At bootstrap Finit can start user scripts from a run-parts(8) like directory: /cfg/start.d. For example, the following starts OSPF:

root@infix:~$ mkdir /cfg/start.d
root@infix:~$ cd /cfg/start.d
root@infix:~$ cp -a /etc/frr .
root@infix:/cfg/start.d$ cat <<EOF >10-enable-ospf.sh
#!/bin/sh
# Use vtysh to modify the OSPF configuration
mount --bind /cfg/frr /etc/frr
initctl enable zebra
initctl enable ospfd
initctl enable bfdd
exit 0
EOF
root@infix:/cfg/start.d$ chmod +x 10-enable-ospf.sh

This is also the way to start containers (provided the images have been downloaded with podman pull first):

root@infix:/cfg/start.d$ cat <<EOF >20-enable-container.sh
#!/bin/sh
podman-service -e -d "Nginx container" -p "-p 80:80 -v /cfg/www:/usr/share/nginx/html:ro" nginx:alpine
exit 0
EOF
root@infix:/cfg/start.d$ chmod +x 20-enable-container.sh

Reboot to activate the changes. To activate the changes without rebooting, run the script and call initctl reload.

Note: Neither Frr (Zebra/OSPF/BFD) or podman are enabled in default Infix builds. Some customers have them enabled in their specific builds, and you can also enable it yourself in Infix by using make menuconfig followed by rebuilding the image.

For more information, see Containers in Infix.

Hardware

aarch64

By default, Infix builds with support for the following boards (you may enable additional boards in the config, of course):

Marvell CN9130 CRB
Marvell EspressoBIN
Microchip SparX-5i PCB135 (eMMC)

See the aarch64 specific documentation for more information.

x86_64

Primarily intended to be run under QEMU for development & test as well as evaluation, demo and training purposes, e.g. using GNS3 or Qeneth.

QEMU

A virtualized instance can easily be launched from a Linux system, with Qemu installed, by issuing make run.

Some settings, e.g. networking, can be configured via make menuconfig under External options -> QEMU virtualization.

GNS3

Download the latest build of the x86_64, or x86_64_classic flavor. Unpack in a dedicated directory and use "Import Appliance" to install the .gns3a file into GNS3. Infix (x86_64) is in the "Router" category, it has 10 interfaces available by default for use as switch ports or routing. The classic build only has one interface by default, geared more towards acting as an end device.

Building

Buildroot is almost stand-alone, but need a few locally installed tools to bootstrap itself. For details, see the excellent manual.

Briefly, to build an Infix image; select the target and then make:

make x86_64_defconfig
make

Online help is available:

make help

To see available defconfigs for supported targets, use:

make list-defconfigs

Note: build dependencies (Debian/Ubuntu): sudo apt install make libssl-dev

Origin & Licensing

Infix is entirely built on Open Source components (packages). Most of them, as well as the build system with its helper scripts and tools, is from Buildroot, which is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See the file COPYING for details.

Some files in Buildroot contain a different license statement. Those files are licensed under the license contained in the file itself.

Buildroot and Infix also bundle patch files, which are applied to the sources of the various packages. Those patches are not covered by the license of Buildroot or Infix. Instead, they are covered by the license of the software to which the patches are applied. When said software is available under multiple licenses, the patches are only provided under the publicly accessible licenses.

Infix releases include the license information covering all Open Source packages. This is extracted automatically at build time using the tool make legal-info. Any proprietary software built on top of Infix, or Buildroot, would need separate auditing to ensure it does not link with any GPL¹ licensed library.

Infix image builds use GNU libc (GLIBC) which is covered by the LGPL. The LGPL does allow proprietary software, as long as said software is linking dynamically, not statically, to GLIBC. ↩︎