Oh man this was great. And also hard to hear. This is a wonderfully ambitious project & capable of yielding really interesting results. But alas, Intel is no longer investing in the underlying Tofino network switch chip (which they inherited/extended from Barefoot), which is the primary/only P4 switch-chip offering.

I'd say... there's a non-zero chance this work alone could revive it, show the technologies worth.

There's a ton of value to having an understandable clear networking stack that you can see & work on, and the podcast is totally correct that vendors almost never offer clarity or possibility. Netops crosses fingers, flips a switch, & sees what happens. By contrast, this is a refreshing take on being responsible for your shit, in a way little else does.

But it's still unclear that embedding much more complex computing in your network switch has real value. Having a far more configurable P4 capability under the belt isn't a little step towards ownership, it's a huge step towards software-defining the network pipelines.

This seems unrelated, but I somewhat look at systems fabrics - smaller scale & faster connections - & see a lot of complexity about figuring what to send where. The idea of embedding more intelligence in the connective fabric has huge alure. But it's unclear who or when someone will truly leverage more flexible switching/interconnect to great effect.