Decade and a half ago there was PacketShader, which used usermode networking+GPUs to do packet routing. It was a thrilling time. I thought this kind of effort t

Decade and a half ago there was PacketShader, which used usermode networking+GPUs to do packet routing. It was a thrilling time. I thought this kind of effort to integrate off-the-shelf hardware and open source software-defined-networking (SDN) was only going to build and amplify. We do have some great SDN but remains a fairly niche world that stays largely behind the scenes. https://shader.kaist.edu/packetshader/index.html https://shader.kaist.edu/packetshader/index.html I wish someone would take up this effort again. It'd be awesome to see VPP or someone target offload to GPUs again. It feels like there's a ton of optimization we could do today based around PCI-P2P, where the network card could DMA direct to the GPU and back out without having to transit main-memory/the CPU at all; lower latency & very efficient. It's a long leap & long hope, but I very much dream that CXL eventually brings us closer to that "disaggregated rack" model where a less host-based fabric starts disrupting architecture, create more deeply connected systems. That said, just dropping down an fpga right on the nic is probably/definitely a smarter move. Seems like a bunch of hyperscaler do this. Unclear how much traction Marvell/Nvidia get from BlueField being on their boxes but it's there. Actually using the fpga is hard of course. Xilinx/AMD have a track record of kicking out some open source projects that seem interesting but don't seem to have any follow through. Nanotube being an XDP offload engine seemed brilliant, like a sure win. https://github.com/Xilinx/nanotube https://github.com/Xilinx/nanotube and https://github.com/Xilinx/open-nic https://github.com/Xilinx/open-nic .