One month ago there was the report on Phoronix of the Broadcom “BNGE” open-source driver being published for forthcoming BCM5770X networking chipsets. That new Broadcom BNGE driver is now set to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.17 kernel for supporting the new Broadcom wired networking hardware at up to 800 Gigabit speeds.
The Broadcom BCM5770X networking ASICs support 50 / 100 / 200 / 400 / 800 Gb/s link speeds. The BNGE “bng_en” driver for supporting the BCM5770X chip family comes in at more than just four thousand lines of code but for the moment only basic hardware/feature support is in place. The initially supported hardware target for this driver is the Broadcom BCM57708. The patch message introducing the driver explains:
“This patch series introduces the Ethernet driver for Broadcom’s BCM5770X chip family, which supports 50/100/200/400/800 Gbps link speeds. The driver is built as the bng_en.ko kernel module.
To keep the series within a reviewable size (~5K lines of code), this initial submission focuses on the core infrastructure and initialization, including:
1) PCIe support (device IDs, probe/remove)
2) Devlink support
3) Firmware communication mechanism
4) Creation of network device
5) PF Resource management (rings, IRQs, etc. for netdev & aux dev)Support for Tx/Rx datapaths, link management, ethtool/devlink operations and additional features will be introduced in the subsequent patch series.
The bng_en driver shares the bnxt_hsi.h file with the bnxt_en driver, as the bng_en driver leverages the hardware communication protocol used by the bnxt_en driver.”
This new Broadcom wired networking driver has been queued into the net-next.git code and as such should be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.17 merge window in late July / early August. Linux 6.17 stable in turn will be out in early October and found in the likes of Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 25.10 out-of-the-box for supporting the Broadcom BCM5770X hardware.
