4 ms·

I havent played in this space for a year or three, but isnt this basically what everyone is doing for fixed port boxes? The os and routing daemons run on a set

I havent played in this space for a year or three, but isnt this basically what everyone is doing for fixed port boxes? The os and routing daemons run on a set of low power xeons with a "bunch" of ram (RIB). That pushes forwarding down to the tomahawk et al asic (FIB). Unknown flows are punted up to the os, and possibly a remote controller (SDN). I thought this was already given inside the DC fabric, and becoming established for interconnect. The places for the traditional giant carrier boxes are, and probably will be, wonky interface/proto/feature support beyond eth & routed IP.

hueving 9y ago
Yes, the thing this replaces is basically the proprietary Broadcom API down at the switch level.
- pyvpx 9y ago
  on the tofino chip, yes. what would be the broadcom api on a tomahawk, a P4-based toolchain is for tofino. P4 is a domain-specific language for packet dataplanes. you can represent the various packet processing pipelines in a broadcom switch chip in P4. broadcom could easily build a P4 to tomahawk API. P4 has tried very hard to be target independent. there are toolchains targeting GPUs, vSwitches, and FPGAs. you can compile P4 to eBPF.
  - tmzt 9y ago
    Can this be tested on consumer level Broadcom SoCs like Linksys routers? It would be an interesting approach to hardening them, by eliminating the OS and much of the attack surface. This might require that it support wireless frames though, and maybe radio, MIMO, diversity if those aren't too far out of scope.
    - pyvpx 9y ago
      not until Broadcom provides a toolchain and writes a P4 backend.