[mmmBacon]

P4 has more or less gone nowhere. Tofino was a full generation behind and didn’t make sense. P4 was compelling because people thought they’d solve the Elephant flow problem with traffic engineering in P4 but the resources to actually do this at scale never materialized for many reasons.

[vriendspookstem]

P4 as a language is still used on some programmable NICs for describing packet parsing dataplanes and exists as an HDL. Unfortunately the SDKs are not always exposed to small scale companies or universities like Intel did with Tofino.

[yusyusyus]

ehh scream SDN 5 times. kinda miss the 2010’s now.

cisco silicon one uses p4 fwiw. internal development though, but the language makes sense for what the things are.

[0xNOTVALID]

do they expose the p4 functionality externally? ive heard this from them but never actually seen the proof - it seems like vaporware

[wmf]

I don't think they would lie but they just don't release the compiler. Maybe they give it to Meta.

[vriendspookstem]

yes,they might provide it to hyperscalers or allows them to customize some of the packet parsing pipeline for these companies.