Not much to add technically but I am very curious who named it Tofino. Tofino is a city by where I live. It is a beautiful location on the Pacific Ocean on Vancouver Island. A favorite destination for our PM Justin Trudeau. Definitely one of the top 100 beautiful places in the world. When I go there I feel stress leave my body and just enjoy the sounds of the waves crashing and the feeling of the sand on my feet melt any worries I may have. Love it there.
Intel's Tofino P4 Software Is Now Open Source
21–30 of 81 posts
Re: Intel's Tofino P4 Software Is Now Open Source
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you want to use P4 for?
The dream is you never have to rely on buggy vendor software again. The reality is, you end up with a complex stack with no or homegrown documentation that requires experienced engineers to operate and maintain. In some environments, that's a perfectly fair trade-off. In most, it isn't.
The APIs these vendors provide are a joke. A bunch of functionality can only be accessed via scripting interactive CLI commands. Some API endpoints cause short downtime / unexpected behavior (eg: by deleting the routing table and adding all entries back 1 by 1), while the on-device commands do not.
And guess what, the switch may decide to print informational or environmental messages interleaved with the command output, because the commands were meant to be run by a human. Good luck knowing if your state-altering command succeeded when you receive broken JSON.
I ended up regex-removing known environmental messages from command outputs..
Re: Intel's Tofino P4 Software Is Now Open Source
#23> This bold move from Intel to open-source the Tofino P4 software is more than just a licensing decision; it’s a call to action for the global developer community. Nah. 5 years ago this would've been bold. Now it's ridding yourself of the baggage of an almost-dead platform that you're about to make fully dead. Still appreciate getting the tooling as FOSS rather than just terminating it, but let's not go for delusions…
What are they making instead?
Re: Intel's Tofino P4 Software Is Now Open Source
#24Am I mistaken or has Intel pretty much shelved the Tofino switching hardware that supports P4 in the first place? I seem to recall Oxide having to switch suppliers over this?
P4 has more or less gone nowhere. Tofino was a full generation behind and didn’t make sense. P4 was compelling because people thought they’d solve the Elephant flow problem with traffic engineering in P4 but the resources to actually do this at scale never materialized for many reasons.
ehh scream SDN 5 times. kinda miss the 2010’s now.
cisco silicon one uses p4 fwiw. internal development though, but the language makes sense for what the things are.
Re: Intel's Tofino P4 Software Is Now Open Source
#25I’m impressed by the political acumen it takes to get a Corp to release code as OSS. My career has seen at least two chunks of work that would have made great OSS (ie potentially useful outside of the single company) but Incoukd not get past the final hurdle And they would have been nice CV boosters as well (my real motivation!)
It helps that Intel has been contributing to OSS since forever, they have good internal processes established and some orgs develop/contribute to OSS pretty much exclusively.
Re: Intel's Tofino P4 Software Is Now Open Source
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
P4 has more or less gone nowhere. Tofino was a full generation behind and didn’t make sense. P4 was compelling because people thought they’d solve the Elephant flow problem with traffic engineering in P4 but the resources to actually do this at scale never materialized for many reasons.
ehh scream SDN 5 times. kinda miss the 2010’s now. cisco silicon one uses p4 fwiw. internal development though, but the language makes sense for what the things are.
do they expose the p4 functionality externally? ive heard this from them but never actually seen the proof - it seems like vaporware
Re: Intel's Tofino P4 Software Is Now Open Source
#27> This bold move from Intel to open-source the Tofino P4 software is more than just a licensing decision; it’s a call to action for the global developer community. Nah. 5 years ago this would've been bold. Now it's ridding yourself of the baggage of an almost-dead platform that you're about to make fully dead. Still appreciate getting the tooling as FOSS rather than just terminating it, but let's not go for delusions…
What are they making instead?
To my knowledge: nothing. Intel is exiting the network switch silicon business¹. Broadcom and nVidia are dominating (different parts of) the market; Marvell and Microchip are fighting for the scraps.
The only "cool" player is Microchip, who have been providing full datasheets, register maps, and open sourcing their drivers for years now. But I'm under no illusions they're doing this out of the goodness of their heart, they're doing it because it's one of very few competetive advantages available to them.
(Which is perfectly fine! FOSS drivers are a great competetive advantage! It's not working super well sadly :/ — but part of the problem here is Broadcom's anticompetetive behavior. To my knowledge, any switch OEM producing Broadcom-based gear will get their NDAs and silicon access revoked if they so much as dream about making devices with non-Broadcom silicon.)
¹ Intel has already exited this business some while ago, they only bought Fulcrum Micro to get better NICs basically since every NIC is nowadays also a switch. Tofino was always a "special beast", not quite competing against e.g. Qumran or Trio. Tofino is (was?) better thought of as special purpose FPGA…
Re: Intel's Tofino P4 Software Is Now Open Source
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
The dream is you never have to rely on buggy vendor software again. The reality is, you end up with a complex stack with no or homegrown documentation that requires experienced engineers to operate and maintain. In some environments, that's a perfectly fair trade-off. In most, it isn't.
The APIs these vendors provide are a joke. A bunch of functionality can only be accessed via scripting interactive CLI commands. Some API endpoints cause short downtime / unexpected behavior (eg: by deleting the routing table and adding all entries back 1 by 1), while the on-device commands do not. And guess what, the switch may decide to print informational or environmental messages interleaved with the command outp…
Improvement on this is more likely to come from switchdev than from Tofino & P4. (though these don't necessarily contradict each other)
You can already run plain Debian on a Mellanox Spectrum device, treat it like a Linux software router, and by the power of magic your routes get pushed into hardware. (Source: device on my table to my right :D) Microchip's SparX-5 should be similar though I don't have one of those to test.
Re: Intel's Tofino P4 Software Is Now Open Source
#29I’m impressed by the political acumen it takes to get a Corp to release code as OSS. My career has seen at least two chunks of work that would have made great OSS (ie potentially useful outside of the single company) but Incoukd not get past the final hurdle And they would have been nice CV boosters as well (my real motivation!)
I had one piece that made it open source (with blessing of 20 committees), then someone that didn't like me ran it back up the flag poll and pulled it back next day
Re: Intel's Tofino P4 Software Is Now Open Source
#30I’m impressed by the political acumen it takes to get a Corp to release code as OSS. My career has seen at least two chunks of work that would have made great OSS (ie potentially useful outside of the single company) but Incoukd not get past the final hurdle And they would have been nice CV boosters as well (my real motivation!)
Well. It looks like abandonning software to the community.
From the "P4 workflow" described at https://p4.org/ I see mentions of compiling to x86, but no mention of ARM, and no mention of BPF. So, as someone who discover it, I wonder if this project is still relevant in 2025.