I noticed that Intel Tofino switches uses P4 but considers the instructions set as a black box.
Xsight XISA flagships are the only switches available with documented ISA. I’ve made several adjustments on how we’ll have to express P4 as an eDSL in system languages like Mojo - new language as a superset of Python. So that I can handle AI logic at the NIC level as Mojo is the language performing the autonomous network analysis.
I’ll appreciate any concerns from anyone
Thanks
Ezra
From Kenya
Your comments about Intel Tofino switches and Xsight ISA sound correct to me. I do not know anything about Mojo, so cannot say anything intelligent about it.
Don’t you think reverse engineering on how Tofino switches handle Instructions Set Architecture is necessary. They might publicly display their ISA but it’s not publicly documented.Tofino switches are programmed in P4 and I don’t think I know anything about the ISA. So all I can say is to reverse engineer how the ISA works on Tofino switches.
This is from the Modular community what’s your view on this?
I would not mind if someone did that, and published their results. But if by asking “Don’t I think it is necessary?” you are asking that I should spend N months of my life to do that for no reward or compensation, when I am not interested in doing so, then my answer is “no’“. I think pretty much everyone in the world would have the same answer, if asked that question.
And the people who know most about it are probably under NDA not to publicize what they know. I don’t know the legal status well enough to know whether Intel would have legal grounds to take action against someone who published such details or not, but I’m certainly not interested in finding out the hard way.
Tofino switches have not been manufactured since 2024 some time, if I recall correctly. Why not spend your time on using chips that are still being made?
Note that the Tofino model (open-p4studio/pkgsrc/tofino-model at main · p4lang/open-p4studio · GitHub) and assembler (p4c/backends/tofino/bf-asm at main · p4lang/p4c · GitHub) are open-source. That should already contain a fair bit of information.
