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P4 Developer Days

P4 Developer Days is a series of live educational webinar recordings featuring different P4-related topics and presented by members of the P4 community. If you are interested in proposing a topics to present at an upcoming P4 Developer Day, please email a short abstract of your proposed topic to ????

Ryan Goodfellow  |  July 18, 2023

Building a Rack Scale Computer with P4 at the Core

Ryan s a networking engineer at Oxide Computer Company. He works in a small team that has built the networking foundation for a rack-scale computer from the ground up with P4 at the core. Building a computing platform around P4 has provided an in-depth understanding of the P4 language and a breadth of experience in the technical machinery and ecosystem that must exist around the language to innovate successfully with P4. Ryan’s current work in P4 is centered around the idea that for a language ecosystem to thrive, the challenges at the hardware-software interface must be open to the engineering teams building systems on the language. To this end, he’s been working on an open ISA for P4 to allow for full-stack open-source compilers to be created.

At Oxide, we’re big proponents of both open-source and programmable networking. In this talk, I’ll present our P4 compiler x4c, and how we leverage the flexibility it provides us to build a product with P4 at the core while still maintaining test and CI-driven workflows. One of the primary challenges of building a product around P4 is integrating P4-programmable elements into a broader hardware/software system and testing at the scale and complexity the system is designed to operate at in a virtualized setting, as doing so physically is not economically feasible.
Mihai Budiu | February 15, 2022
Understanding the Open-Source P416 Compiler

Ryan s a networking engineer at Oxide Computer Company. He works in a small team that has built the networking foundation for a rack-scale computer from the ground up with P4 at the core. Building a computing platform around P4 has provided an in-depth understanding of the P4 language and a breadth of experience in the technical machinery and ecosystem that must exist around the language to innovate successfully with P4. Ryan’s current work in P4 is centered around the idea that for a language ecosystem to thrive, the challenges at the hardware-software interface must be open to the engineering teams building systems on the language. To this end, he’s been working on an open ISA for P4 to allow for full-stack open-source compilers to be created.

At Oxide, we’re big proponents of both open-source and programmable networking. In this talk, I’ll present our P4 compiler x4c, and how we leverage the flexibility it provides us to build a product with P4 at the core while still maintaining test and CI-driven workflows. One of the primary challenges of building a product around P4 is integrating P4-programmable elements into a broader hardware/software system and testing at the scale and complexity the system is designed to operate at in a virtualized setting, as doing so physically is not economically feasible.