Intel's commitment to P4

[McKeown, Nick]

Dear P4 Community:

 

Since its introduction a decade ago, P4 has led to a Cambrian explosion of ideas including new protocols, new applications like in-band telemetry, and new testing, validation, and formal verification techniques. P4 has become the industry standard for programming and specifying forwarding behavior. As a measure of success, one in four papers published at ACM SIGCOMM ’22 — the top conference for networking research — are built on P4 in some way.

 

As you may know, Intel recently announced that it will stop development of the next-generation Intel® Tofino® Intelligent Fabric Processor (IFP) products currently on its roadmap. However, we will continue to sell and support our existing Tofino® products. Intel Tofino® IFPs proved to the world that you can build fully programmable switches without compromising on performance. Tofino’s program independent switch architecture (PISA) will have a lasting effect on how packet-processing pipelines are built; it has already influenced programmable products at the edge such as SmartNICs and IPUs.

 

Although Tofino’s roadmap is curtailed, I’d like to make clear that the team here at Intel remains committed to P4 as the language of choice across a wide range of Intel products and platforms, including our IPUs (ASIC and FPGA). The mission of Intel Network and Edge (NEX) group remains unchanged: we design and sell products to enable network owners to decide how packets are processed and to deploy their own creative new solutions. P4 is an essential part of our roadmap for IPUs, FPGAs, DPDK, IDPK, and more.

 

Intel remains committed to open source and we continue to contribute to, and support, the P4 community, including the design of the P4 language, standard architectures, control APIs, and applications. And we will continue to develop open-source targets like P4TC, which integrates P4 into the Linux kernel, bringing a new level of programmability to the network edge.

 

Together, as a community, we can feel proud for successfully fostering a “revolution” in how industry and researchers think about networks. In the past, behaviors were baked into fixed function hardware; today, we can specify and program behaviors in software that are compiled and deployed in-situ, allowing beautiful new ideas to be tested and deployed more quickly. There is no going back.

 

P4 got its start when a small group got together to think about new abstractions for programmable networking. We’ve now grown into a vibrant community of researchers and practitioners who are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible across the full range of programmable targets. I’m honored to be a part of this community and I’m inspired by what we’ve accomplished and excited about what we will achieve in the future.

 

Sincerely,

Nick McKeown

Senior VP & GM, Senior Fellow

Network and Edge Group (NEX)

 

 

 

[hem...@mnkcg.com]

A Cavium/Marvell Octeon using vpp/dpdk for software is worth investigating. I can provide the p4tovpp/dpdk compiler, especially to a university, at a modest price.  Octeon supports same data rates as FPGA. Further vpp is the most comprehensive networking data plane. Additionally, a FPGA p4c tends to restrict P4, which a software data plane P4 and vpp/dpdk won’t restrict.

 

Also see, https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hemant-singh-a487b47_vpp-p4-timer-activity-6980682355166351360-E6iS?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

 

Hemant

 

 

[hem...@mnkcg.com]

Also, with more disaggregation of networking nodes, e.g., 5G cellular, the nodes need 400-800G rate, crypto, state machine, and timers at large scale. Can’t get all these features in P4 except with MNK’s P4toVPP/DPDK compiler.

 

Hemant

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[hem...@mnkcg.com]

I thank Nick and the Barefoot team for developing Tofino and P4 compiler for it – great product.

 

However, product development is tricky. I develop a switch product using Tofino II. I take the switch to a cloud provider who likes it. The operator asks what roadmap for your switch is because my services will double bandwidth in four years. My reply is “no roadmap” and the operator refuses to buy my switch.  I have to look at alternatives immediately.

 

Best,

 

Hemant

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[KRISHNA VIJAY]

Dear Sir/Madam,

I have just started the installation of P4 Studio in my Tofino Aurora 710 switch with Ubuntu 22.04 NOS for this, I have collected the files 

1. bf-sde-9.11.0.tgz
2. bf-netberg-aurora-710-750-bsp-9.11.0-211214.tgz                               
3. and created a  sde directory to keep the extracted files from the above two sources.
4. cd /sde/bf-sde-9.11.0/p4studio/ 
5. sudo ./p4studio dependencies install      Success 
6. sudo ./p4studio interactive:- But the Profile options are not as expected the options can be viewed 
7. Further, I am not able to utilize the options of SDE such as 
8. ./run_switchd.sh -p switch  or  bfshell> ucli    - command not found
9. screenshot is enclosed for your reference. Kindly help me to utilize the P4 studio. 
10.  Hope I am not violating the disclosure agreement as I am not sharing any data pertaining to the Intel Tofino training program.

Eagerly waiting for your valuable input on the given problem. 

With regards:

Krishna

सोमवार, 30 जनवरी 2023 को 8:32:49 am UTC+5:30 बजे McKeown, Nick ने लिखा:

[Andy Fingerhut]

The level of detail about the Tofino SDE you are asking about is best asked through official Intel support channels, which you can find links to here: https://forum.p4.org/t/intel-r-tofino-tm-family-tna-and-p4studio-questions/504

Regards,

Andy Fingerhut

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