Intel(r) Tofino(tm) Family, TNA, and P4Studio questions

Getting Started with P4
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There is a fair amount of public information about Tofino available, but in general, unless someone can point you at a public source for answers, any specific questions about Tofino hardware features, Tofino Native Architecture (TNA) or features of Intel P4Studio SDE, are best directed to Intel-specific forums created for this purpose, NOT discussed in a public forum.

Here are a couple of other keywords that can help others to find this post faster: Intel P4 compiler for Tofino (bf-p4c), Tofino Traffic Manager (TM), Tofino Packet Replication Engine (PRE), Tofino Packet Generator (PktGen), Stateful ALU (SALU), Packet Header Vector (PHV), Match-Action Unit (MAU), Ghost Thread, Tofino2, T2NA, Tofino3, T3NA.

Some public information is available here, including a document describing the Tofino Native Architecture (TNA): GitHub - barefootnetworks/Open-Tofino. However, follow-up questions about that repository’s contents should be directed to one of the Intel-specific forums linked above.

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I am replying to a post originally made in late 2022, and since then:

(a) Tofino and Tofino2 are no longer sold by Intel (some can still be bought used from previous buyers).

(b) Intel released a large fraction of Tofino software as open source in this repository: GitHub - p4lang/open-p4studio. The code in the repository is enough to run the Tofino simulation model, write P4 programs for Tofino, compile them, and run them on that simulation model, which provides lots of debugging detail for developing P4 programs on Tofino.

(c) That repository contains some, but not all, of the software required to operate a real hardware board with a Tofino ASIC. Intel has in October 2025 announced that they will grant requests for access to BSP and driver software required for real Tofino hardware until January 1, 2026, but after that time, they will no longer give out copies of this software to Tofino owners. If you have Tofino hardware but do not yet have access to this software, please request it from Intel before that date.

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