Netronome has developed a domain-specific architecture (DSA) that allows customers to build accelerators for networking and storage applications in data center and edge computing markets. This delivers efficient and high-performance heterogeneous solutions when paired with multi-core processors. Netronome’s technology can be purchased as hardened IP blocks to build custom SoC silicon devices, as SoC devices, SmartNICs or Smart Edge platforms and related software.
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For decades, the evolution of computing performance has been governed by Moore’s law, which stated that every two years, the size of transistors would decrease and their numbers in dense integrated circuits would double. Then physics caught up, and the industry started to add processing cores to compensate the slow down of that curve (or to be more accurate, the end of frequency scaling)
Programmability is everywhere! Gone are the days when hardware components would be entrusted with a single task. Nowadays, even network cards run low-level software, also known as “firmware,” usually distributed as binary images by vendors. But what if we were to open these programs to the users? Since we love to create new opportunities, Netronome just published the source code for the CoreNIC firmware, used with the Agilio SmartNICs.
Netronome is releasing libkefir, a library for converting network filtering rules into BPF programs, in a simple and efficient way! But how does it work? What is it for? Fear not, for all your questions will [hopefully!] be addressed in this blog.
Time flies! One year has passed already since our coverage of FOSDEM 2018, and the 2019 edition shows that eBPF continues to draw a lot of attention! The event took place as usual in Brussels, on the first weekend of February. In spite of the snow that fell on the Belgian capital most of the day Saturday, more than 8,000 people were expected to attend what might be the biggest Open Source event in Europe.
Netronome’s Agilio CX and FX SmartNICs are capable of running BPF programs, directly offloaded from the Linux kernel. This feature has been supported for a couple of years now. Several presentations of BPF hardware offload have been made by the BPF engineering team in conferences such as Netdev 1.2, Netdev 2.2 or even FOSDEM 2018, or in webinars such as our recent webinars on BPF just-in-time (JIT) compiler, offload internals, and tooling.
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Quentin Monnet is a senior software engineer at Netronome, where he works on advanced technologies at the driver level, such as the software pieces of eBPF offload, and modestly contributes to several open source projects. Before joining Netronome, he was part of the Research & Development team at 6WIND, and was involved in European research projects that focused on fast, flexible and stateful packet processing for SDNs. Quentin holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Université Paris-Est, France.