Am 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?

I’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!)

As far as I can tell, Software Defined Networking (which this is about: "P4 is a domain-specific language for network devices") by now is pretty much a decade-old promise that never materialized. I'd still love to be wrong though!

So, let's take the next paragraph: "Before P4, vendors had total control over the functionality supported in the network (...) controlled the rollout of new features (e.g., VXLAN), and rollouts took years"

Anyone has a pointer to any actually available hardware capable of L2 and L3 packet processing where I could have implemented VXLAN in, say, weeks using P4? Again, as far as I can tell, it's all either killed-off-a-long-time-ago, "contact us" vaporware, or exotic 40/100-Gb-only Top-o-Rack gear, and even for those, there is nary an "add to cart" button in sight...

> 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 here.

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.

Related P4: open-source programming language for high-performance packet switching (98 points, 2016, 19 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903478

There's more to this than meets the eye. We are building the world's first open, softwre only, intelligent, content-aware switches. Dual protocol stacks, our SPAN-AI and TCP/IP. This saves us having to develop the TCP/IP stack and a bunch of router code. Brilliant. It also opens up the market for Intel X86 based "Smart Switches" i.e. X86 servers with SmartNICs which is our first platform. Again very smart. This may the first glimmerings of the new Intel. We hope so! Rhett, founder CTO of https://gtsystems.io/

After having used & automated configuration of "traditional" switching/routing devices for years (Cisco , Arista, Juniper), I can't wait for P4 devices to take over

Unless there are devices that I could buy (48 port 1U style switches) and until this supports integrating with something like switchdev ( https://docs.kernel.org/networking/switchdev.html ) then this is too little too late. I hope I'm wrong though.

does anyone know if someone can make this switchdev friendly?

This is not Perforce.