Hardware Podcasts

The Tale of Reverso

Oxide and Friends · 16 May 2026 · 1h 06m · Episode 11

What this episode covers

Robert "RFK" Keith, Adam Suczewski, and Matt Keeter of Oxide Computer Company explain the development of Reverso, a simple passive test fixture designed to validate cable backplane integrity during high-volume manufacturing. The team discovered that Reverso triggered transient TCP disconnects in the RackTest software due to a bug in the VSC7448 management switch's MAC address table handling. The root cause was the switch's default behavior of not using VLAN tags for MAC table associations, causing it to misdirect packets when the same MAC address appeared on multiple ports via the loopback. The fix involved enabling a configuration bit to make the MAC table VLAN-aware, resolving the issue and enabling Oxide to scale production.

Most relevant to

companies scaling up

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Oxide Computer Company
Products
Reverso, RackTest, Dendrite
Chips
VSC7448, Tofino
Also
Hubris, Illumos

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