Hard to keep up with the concepts! about easynic

[lukego]

Thanks for commenting. Have to clarify this.

RISC-V is an inspiration in that it defines a simple and stable hardware-software interface. This means that people can implement new hardware with the minimum of fuss for software people who don't need to rewrite their compiler backend for a new instruction sets all the time. So hardware and software implementations can evolve independently over each other.

The NIC world needs to be more like this. Currently it feels more like the old Unix server days where you have lots of vendors - Sun, SGI, IBM, HP, etc - and buying hardware from one of them also means buying into their proprietary instruction set, operating system, C compiler, etc.

So we see the NIC vendors putting a different proprietary hardware-software interface on each model, expecting users to buy into their software ecosystems to use their hardware, and increasingly forming consortia to build Frankenstein-esque mergers of their code. This causes a lot of collateral complications for software people, even though all we want to do is send and receive packets.

We gave a talk on this topic at FOSDEM 2018 (sorry about the audio): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgwt7SmvVWA

[lukego]

I talked more about this topic at FOSDEM on the weekend. Just a 10-minute talk in the context of ConnectX. https://youtu.be/ZigsHkxMHPo