• Introduction
• Hardware
• Qemu
• GNS3
• Building
• Origin & Licensing

Introduction

Infix is an embedded Linux Network Operating System (NOS) based on Buildroot, Finit, ifupdown-ng, and Clixon. 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.

Login with user 'root', no password by default on plain builds. See the online help command for an introduction to the system.

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.

amd64

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 amd64, unpack in a dedicated directory and use "Import Appliance" to install the .gns3a file into GNS3. Infix will show up in the "Router" category, it has 10 interfaces available by default for use as switch ports or routing.

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 amd64_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 Buiildroot, 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.

Footnotes

1. 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. ↩