Future of P4 and buidling new device on P4

1

Hello,

I was quite excited at using p4 for a new network appliance device and especially with the performance and flexibility of Tofino chipsets, but digging deeper I am finding some dark clouds.

  1. Tofino remains the only openly available chip which supports P4. (I have since heard that Jerico 2 too supports P4) But Tofino is going to be EOLd
  2. Broadcom has NPL, which is similar to P4. So I am not sure how far is their commitment to P4 moving forward. Even with NPL the activity seems to be very less, which gives me the vibes that they are not very keen on this whole programmable switch thing.

There are not much other options in the horizon for a hardware accelerated network appliance like switch or router which can benefit from P4.

So my question is am I correct in assuming that there are not many hardware based p4 targets other than Tofino? If that is the case how do you see adopting P4 for developing a new network or a router?

1 Like
2

There are multiple programmable NICs that use P4 for programming them, including ones from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia. It is not clear to me how large a volume of customer you need to be in order to get access to the development environments – unlike Tofino, you might not be able to buy just one of them and get the development environment.

I cannot make any promises on behalf of others, on whether this will happen, or if it does exactly when, but one thing to keep an eye out for is the Xsight Labs 12.8 Tbps programmable Ethernet switch ASIC, which Oxide Computer has earlier hinted that they will be releasing a P4 compiler as open source that targets it. [1] [2]

[1] Xsight Labs Announces X2 Programmable SDN Ethernet Switches
[2] Announcing Next-Generation P4-Programmable Datacenter Switching

2 Likes
3

Thank you for the reassuring reply.

Based on the answer I could see, apart from Tofino, there is AMD Pensando which supports P4. From Nvidia NVIDIA BlueField was supposed to support P4, but I could not find any concrete information about it.

HPE Aruba Networking CX 10000 Switch Series is the only switch I could see which support P4 and not using Tofino.

Did I miss any other NICs or switchs?

Xsight Labs and Oxide Computer looks quite interesting and with the track record of Oxide computing backing it it looks promising.

1 Like
4

I forgot to mention that Cisco’s Silicon One family of switch ASICs also use a variant of P4 for programming their data paths. Like many other devices mentioned earlier, gaining access to the development kit that lets you program such devices is by special arrangement, not the normal standard way to buy the device.

2 Likes