Comment by lifeisstillgood 2 days ago
I’m impressed by the political acumen it takes to get a Corp to release code as OSS. My career has seen at least two chunks of work that would have made great OSS (ie potentially useful outside of the single company) but Incoukd not get past the final hurdle
And they would have been nice CV boosters as well (my real motivation!)
I'm not familiar with P4 but with some quick digging it seems like the compiler does support eBPF as a target. Additionally, I don't think the compiler outputs x86 directly at all, and instead includes targets like DPDK which supports ARM in addition to x86.
There's a bunch of network operating systems that use P4 (Arista EOS, Cisco NX-OS, IPinfusion OCNOS, Microsoft SONiC, etc)
Is x86 dead for wire powered devices?
Regardless, OSS is probably the best way to get it onto other architectures.
I think the biggest contributor to these processes was going open source in their graphics drivers.
They went from "we have tons of 3rd party IP in these!" to, "you don't need to download anything, it's in kernel mainline now" in a generation and they're off to the races after that.
Maybe their Ethernet drivers were open before that, I don't remember but, video drivers made them pass a threshold in maturity IMHO.
Intel embraced Linux when they bet big in datacenters in early 2002. The momentum they got from there, with Linux dominating the sector, made them realize how much of a benefit it is to have a free software stack. With Linux they were able to go head to head with the incumbents of the day.
Linux and x86 became unbeatable in the space for 20 years.
They have known how important it is. They won't forget.
Yes, however, they first made their hardware standard compliant rather than making their driver open source.
The open source part came later, starting with CPU and chipset support, then Ethernet, then GPUs IIRC.
The biggest and sweetest side-effect is Desktop/Personal use Linux support as long as the hardware doesn't do anything janky, or too janky.
Well. It looks like abandonning software to the community.
From the "P4 workflow" described at https://p4.org/ I see mentions of compiling to x86, but no mention of ARM, and no mention of BPF. So, as someone who discover it, I wonder if this project is still relevant in 2025.