I seem to recall Oxide having to switch suppliers over this?
I'm not complaining but it's weird that they're open sourcing the SDK now. Maybe it's to support Mount Evans.
https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2024/12/08/why-gelsinger-was-wr...
I'd love to be wrong, this is just what people said.
cisco silicon one uses p4 fwiw. internal development though, but the language makes sense for what the things are.
And they would have been nice CV boosters as well (my real motivation!)
From the "P4 workflow" described at https://p4.org/ I see mentions of compiling to x86, but no mention of ARM, and no mention of BPF. So, as someone who discover it, I wonder if this project is still relevant in 2025.
Regardless, OSS is probably the best way to get it onto other architectures.
They went from "we have tons of 3rd party IP in these!" to, "you don't need to download anything, it's in kernel mainline now" in a generation and they're off to the races after that.
Maybe their Ethernet drivers were open before that, I don't remember but, video drivers made them pass a threshold in maturity IMHO.
There are a good number of people that would LOL at this statement, myself included.
Maybe they have such processes now, because at one point . . . Well “mistakes were made”.
So, let's take the next paragraph: "Before P4, vendors had total control over the functionality supported in the network (...) controlled the rollout of new features (e.g., VXLAN), and rollouts took years"
Anyone has a pointer to any actually available hardware capable of L2 and L3 packet processing where I could have implemented VXLAN in, say, weeks using P4? Again, as far as I can tell, it's all either killed-off-a-long-time-ago, "contact us" vaporware, or exotic 40/100-Gb-only Top-o-Rack gear, and even for those, there is nary an "add to cart" button in sight...
P4 is really only needed in data center networks because slower campus/home networks can usually get away with software processing and their lower prices probably can't support the R&D of a programmable architecture.
Nah. 5 years ago this would've been bold. Now it's ridding yourself of the baggage of an almost-dead platform that you're about to make fully dead.
Still appreciate getting the tooling as FOSS rather than just terminating it, but let's not go for delusions here.
The only "cool" player is Microchip, who have been providing full datasheets, register maps, and open sourcing their drivers for years now. But I'm under no illusions they're doing this out of the goodness of their heart, they're doing it because it's one of very few competetive advantages available to them.
(Which is perfectly fine! FOSS drivers are a great competetive advantage! It's not working super well sadly :/ — but part of the problem here is Broadcom's anticompetetive behavior. To my knowledge, any switch OEM producing Broadcom-based gear will get their NDAs and silicon access revoked if they so much as dream about making devices with non-Broadcom silicon.)
¹ Intel has already exited this business some while ago, they only bought Fulcrum Micro to get better NICs basically since every NIC is nowadays also a switch. Tofino was always a "special beast", not quite competing against e.g. Qumran or Trio. Tofino is (was?) better thought of as special purpose FPGA…
I particularly enjoy the winter trips to SF to show my colleagues pictures of the latest cold water surf adventure.
The reality is, you end up with a complex stack with no or homegrown documentation that requires experienced engineers to operate and maintain.
In some environments, that's a perfectly fair trade-off. In most, it isn't.
does anyone know if someone can make this switchdev friendly?
Writing a switchdev driver is an enormous amount of work so it only happens when someone (usually the chip vendor) pays for it. Any code open-sourced by Intel probably won't meet Linux kernel standards so it would have to be completely rewritten (like the tg3 driver from the old days).
