I am leading a research group at a university. We want to use P4 for CPS applications and are in the process of purchasing two Tofino2 switches. For that, I recently applied for the Intel Connectivity Research Program to obtain the Intel P4Studio before we can buy the hardware. The notification says there is a 20-business-day lead time for verification.
Those who recently joined just wanted to check if this program is active and what is the wait time to get NDA or approval to get P4 Studio?
I do not know the wait time to get an Intel NDA or approval to get P4 Studio, but read on.
In case you had not heard the news from last month, Intel is planning to open source all Tofino software: the P4 compiler, the driver code, the runtime, and I believe also the visualizer tool showing the hardware resource usage after a successful compilation run. Either most or all of the Tofino P4 compiler back end has been released to open source already: p4c/backends/tofino at main · p4lang/p4c · GitHub
That said, things are not yet in a state where I can point you to installation instructions to install everything from open source. I have been told that this should happen soon, but I do not have any targeted date that I have heard for completion of this task.
When it is ready, I will encourage the folks responsible for doing this at Intel to announce it far and wide, which should include at least:
Although Intel started to open-source the SDE, the process is slow and what exactly will be released is not yet clear. For example, I do not believe they will be open-sourcing the visualizer and there might be some critical pieces that they will not even be able to open-source. Moreover, they have not explicitly said that no NDA is required.
Thus, I’d highly encourage you to apply to ICRP. Intel responses might be slow, indeed. DM me if you feel that way, I’ll try to pull some strings there.