The Sidecar Switch

Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: November 29th, 2021

The Sidecar Switch

We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for November 29th, 2021.

In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, our special guest was Arjen Roodselaar; other speakers on November 29th included Rick Altherr, Simeon Miteff, MattSci, Jason Ozolins, Thomas and Edwin Peer. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)

Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:

• [@3:04](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=184) Arjen’s announcement about the rack switch
• Cadence Allegro PCB editor
• [@11:35](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=695) Should we do our own switch? 
  • “We’re just going to tweak existing designs…”
• Intel Tofino 2 page
  • Barefoot Networks wiki
  • P4 language wiki
• [@24:07](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=1447) What makes this chip a beast?
• [@33:24](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=2004) Cable backplane, sleds
• [@37:11](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=2231) Sidecar
• [@38:52](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=2332) Management network (out of band) 
  • NC-SI network controller sideband interface wiki > Rick: A lot of the BMC style management functionality just > kinda got tacked on to PC systems.
• [@48:36](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=2916) SDN software-defined networking wiki
  • NCI National Computational Infrastructure (Australia) wiki
  • Network function virtualization wiki
• [@55:12](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=3312) The tofino simulator
• [@59:51](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=3591) Trust model, root of trust, service processor
• [@1:02:31](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=3751) Can the switch run independent of the PCIe host?
• [@1:08:35](https://youtu.be/yl24yHlLRy0?t=4115) The journey. The time scale of these signaling components. Heat sinks and practice boards
• Happy Hanukkah!

If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!