Barefoot "Tofino": 6.4 Tbps whitebox switch silicon?

Thu Jun 16 14:35:15 UTC 2016

On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 1:19 AM, Saku Ytti <saku at ytti.fi> wrote:
> On 16 June 2016 at 06:21, Eric Kuhnke <eric.kuhnke at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Based on their investors, could have interesting results for much lower
>> cost 100GbE whitebox switches.
>
> Why lower cost? The BOM isn't the expensive part, the code is the
> expensive part. Only way I see this happening, is if we get open
> source routing suite for the box, i.e. 0 cost software.

It shouldn't be long before we see open source routing suites (Bird,
Quagga, GoBGP, etc) running on Linux (ONL, OS10, OpenSwitch). There is
a P4 program that implements the Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI),
which provides a common interface, device independent, interface to
merchant silicon.

http://p4.org/p4/an-open-source-p4-switch-with-sai-support/

A quick way to do interesting things with the programmable data plane
is to use P4 to augment the basic switching / routing behavior
provided by SAI: moving resources from layer 2 tables to layer 3
tables, adding telemetry, adding additional control capabilities,
etc.:

http://blog.sflow.com/2016/06/programmable-hardware-barefoot-networks.html