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!)
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.
I think the biggest contributor to these processes was going open source in their graphics drivers.
They went from "we have tons of 3rd party IP in these!" to, "you don't need to download anything, it's in kernel mainline now" in a generation and they're off to the races after that.
Maybe their Ethernet drivers were open before that, I don't remember but, video drivers made them pass a threshold in maturity IMHO.
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.
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
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?
Yes, Intel canceled Tofino two years ago.
I'm not complaining but it's weird that they're open sourcing the SDK now. Maybe it's to support Mount Evans.
Releasing dead software that is used only to support dead hardware?
That's fair enough.
I also was told tofino was looking EOL. Like NUC, dropped from some C suites KPI set and longterm roadmap.
I'd love to be wrong, this is just what people said.
However, NUC form factor is more lively than ever before. Maybe someone can grab the language and run for something? Miktrotik guys come into my mind.
NUC somewhat avoided the google^Wintel graveyard - they sold at least the branding to Asus.
NUCs are shifting completely to ASUS who is going to continue working on them and there are some long term commitments (there are industrial variants for example)
They didnt switch supplier iirc they are still using Tofino since it is is still a capable hardware and they see it being useful for years to come
They spoke on their podcast (I think it was there?) about ditching Tofino for the next generation of the Oxide computer. So it sounds like the current model will always ship with Tofino, but due to no future product development they won't use it again in a new machine. It sounded like they had just secured a replacement for the future but I can't remember who it was.
We've talked about it a bunch, most recently when talking about Intel after Gelsinger.[0] I went into more detail on Intel's total mishandling of Tofino in my blog entry describing why Gelsinger was the wrong choice to lead Intel in 2021.[1]
As you might imagine, this move from Intel is something that we at Oxide have advocated for strenuously -- and it is a tremendous tribute to the former Tofino team at Intel that this got done. As I hope I made clear in my blog entry: the folks working on Tofino at Intel have been great to work with; they deserved much better than their (former) executive leadership.
[0] https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/intel-after...
[1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2024/12/08/why-gelsinger-was-wr...
Thanks for the context, your respect for the Tofino team certainly came through in the podcast.
Thanks Brian [0] was a great podcast and got me through a large lawn mowing!
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
> 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.
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…
AMD ended up entering the market to some extent - big powerful software-modifiable NIC chips that can also serve as switches from my understanding.
But like Tofino, it's mostly stuff that is "behind the curtain"at hyperscalers or deep inside closed box switches
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
I believe that Arista has (had?) P4 devices in their lineup, but after Intel's sunsetting of that platform, they probably axed them.
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..
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.
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...
I would be curious as well. Every time we try something "software defined" the drawbacks are major, cost goes up, stability goes down and most importantly, bandwidth goes down by a factor 10. The only software defined networking gear we use is OpenBSD, to do some complex routing, but we cannot go above 5GB/s.
Seems to be used in the military radio space.
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.
chatgpt-4o-latest: Here's a cleaned-up summary of that article, stripped of all the fluff, marketing spin, and unnecessary jargon:
Intel's Tofino P4 Software is Now Open Source
Intel has announced that its P4 programming software for Tofino series networking chips is now open source. This includes the P4 Studio Software Development Environment (SDE) and tools for programming and testing the switch pipeline. By open-sourcing this software, Intel aims to promote wider adoption of P4, deepen industry collaboration, and make it easier for developers, academic researchers, and organizations to experiment and innovate with programmable networking hardware.
This move provides open access to the software tools needed to work with Tofino, such as the compiler and runtime, fostering transparency and community contributions. The code and instructions are available on GitHub, along with resources to help contributors get started.