Episode Details

Bryan and Adam are joined by a number of members of the Oxide networking team to talk about the networking software that drives the Oxide rack. It turns out that rack-scale networking is hard... and has enormous benefits!

We've been hosting a live show weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour, and recording them all; here is the recording from February 27th, 2023.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Ryan Goodfellow, Levon Tarver, Ben Naecker, and Arjen Roodselaar.

Links

• Intel Tofino Series
• P4 (programming language) - Wikipedia
• p4lang/p4c: P4_16 reference compiler
• oxidecomputer/p4: A P4 compiler
• The quote crate: Rust quasi-quoting
• RIFT WG - Routing In Fat Trees | IETF Community Wiki

Here's (much of) the live chat from the show:

• ahl https://github.com/oxidecomputer/oxide-and-friends/blob/master/2021_11_29.md
• ahl That's the Sidecar switch episode
• bcantrill https://p4.org/
• admchl What does "at line rate" mean?
• Riking Line rate = As fast as the packets could possibly come. 1Gbit, 10Gbit, 100Gbit, etc
• admchl Do you need ASICs to hit that speed? I assume x86_64 is not going to be fast enough for these specialised operations?
• levon Yes, the Tofino 2 is the ASIC
• bcantrill You need ASICs
• bnaecker Yes, you really can't do these kinds of operations on a general purpose CPU.
• rng_drizzt Yeah, you need specialized silicon here.
• JustinAzoff Right, also often across all ports at the same time in both direction. a 48 port 10gbps switch will have a line rate of 960gbps (10 ** 48 ** 2)
• duckman So the advantage is being able to offload compute to the switch?
• bnaecker Yes, and specifically that you can separate the data plane (operations on the packets) from the control plane (decisions about what operations to allow or make).
• tahnok What's TCAM?
• levon Ternary Content Addressable Memory
• bnaecker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_memory#Ternary_CAMs
• ryaeng Sure beats logging into a number of Cisco switches and making changes at the console.
• admchl This is my favourite episode in a long time, this is all really fascinating.
• rng_drizzt the first Sidecar episode was nearly 1.5 years ago ü§Ø , right after we cut the first rev
• levon That episode blew my mind
• duckman This sounds like a big deal on the scale of ebpf
• duckman Or bigger
• bnaecker It is extremely useful for understanding the processing pipelines. As long as you only run single-packet integration tests üôÇ
• od0 just want to g