Primitives for NIC (Netronome)

1) Encapsulation (or Virtualization) :

This primitive will add a new header (gre) to the packet at a particular location of the header-stack.

2) Congestion Control Aides : CCP[Sigcomm '18]

This is a set of primitives which monitor various metrics of tcp flows in smart-nic to provide regular feedback to a control plane.

3) Payload Scan :

This primitive searches for a pattern in the payload and increments a counter if it matches. One problem with doing this in smart-nic as opposed to tofino is that, this reduces the throughtput of the effective packets by upto 90%.

4) Encryption :

Ideally, netronome supports IPSec, still figuring out how to encrypt/decrypt.

Use-Cases only for Smart NICs

1. Host-based Congestion-control.
2. Virtualization (e.g. VXLAN, GRE, VFP)
3. Service Chaining.
4. Network routing based on data-locality (routing to a certain core on the host, where the related data is present).
5. Deep-packet Inspection (when payload is encrypted).
6. RDMA-based applications.
7. Application Acceleration (micro-services on the FPGA of nic).

Use-cases common for Smart NICs or Programmable switches

1. Data distribution offload.
2. Network Functions (e.g. SLB, firewalls, NAT, etc).
3. Network Security (DDoS, IDS , etc).
4. Computation based on network data.

Steps to execute a program in Netronome Nic:

1. Load the nfp kernel module :

     sudo modprobe nfp nfp_pf_netdev=0 nfp_dev_cpp=1

2. Start the run-time environment :

     sudo systemctl start nfp-sdk6-rte
     sudo systemctl start nfp-sdk6-rte-debug

3. Build the program using the below command :

     sudo nfp4build -s AMDA0096-0001:0 -l lithium -o <prog_name>.nffw -p nfp-build -4 <prog_name>.p4 

4. Load the firmware using the command :

     sudo nfp-nffw load -s <prog_name>.nffw

5. Load the design on the nic :

     sudo rtecli design-load -f <prog_name>.nffw -p nfp-build/pif_design.json -c user_config.json

Now you must see the vf interfaces in ifconfig.