Top all-time · #9113
Netronome
Company blog · netronome.com/blogsystemshardware
Netronome is the company blog at netronome.com, writing about systems and hardware. Since 2018, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 10 times, most often “BPF, EBPF, XDP and Bpfilter”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Netronome's blog for its posts on BPF, eBPF, XDP and bpfilter, including metrics on NIC offloading. Several linked posts are product or datasheet PDFs rather than blog posts.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Netronome's team brings a unified vision of bringing unprecedented levels of scale and efficiency to data centers.
Most-linked posts?
- BPF, EBPF, XDP and Bpfilter5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-04-16
What Hacker News says?
@WGH_ You're dead - presumably because the profile is new, and immediately made a comment? I think maybe anti-spam is a bit aggressive, unless there's some linked account that accounts for the ban? At any rate, I agree information on bpf as a iptables work-a-like is scarce. This helps a bit: https://www.netronome.com/blog/bpf-ebpf-xdp-and-bpfilter-wha... Then there's of course the kernel docs, eg: https://git.kernel…
Comment linking /blog/bpf-ebpf-xdp-and-bpfilter-what-are-these-things-and-what-do-they-mean-enterprise/
on “Getting Started with WireGuard”Submitted BPF, EBPF, XDP and Bpfilter as a story · 96 points
HN discussionXDP can run in the driver in the "normal" mode, so it's on host CPU. But for some NICs like Netronome nfp, the kernel can JIT the BPF program into the instruction set for nfp and then run 'offloaded' on the card directly, so not even affecting host CPU in any way. See also here for a recent blog post: https://www.netronome.com/blog/bpf-ebpf-xdp-and-bpfilter-wha... So both is possible, but even with XDP running on ho…
Comment linking /blog/bpf-ebpf-xdp-and-bpfilter-what-are-these-things-and-what-do-they-mean-enterprise/
on “How to drop 10M packets per second”Submitted EBPF, XDP and Bpfilter. What Are These Things and What Do They Mean? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe NICs I could find that enable this behavior belong to Netronome: https://www.netronome.com/products/agilio-cx/ I've been meaning to get my hand on one of these to play around with eBPF offload. There is also XDP (a subsystem of eBPF) which lets you take action before the packets run up the entire network stack.
Comment linking /products/agilio-cx/
on “Comparing TCP and QUIC”Submitted The $200M Funding Endorsement: SmartNICs Are Rock Stars in Modern Data Centers as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHow do you handle buffering? Any challenges with processing new headers/encapsulation schemes, or is it flexible in that regard? [ Edit: Nevermind, found the data sheet: https://www.netronome.com/media/documents/PB_NFP-4000.pdf ] One remaining question - how big is the space allocated to lookups/LPM?
Comment linking /media/documents/PB_NFP-4000.pdf
on “BPF, EBPF, XDP and Bpfilter”What if you have no application and you're purely forwarding traffic? That's what I'm measuring here (and that's actually typically faster than passing packets up to user space apps to consume through syscalls). 25G line rate is 37MPPS - are you saying you have zero problem forwarding at that line rate? I'd be very surprised if that's being done in the kernel. I'd be more surprised if you said that you're consuming…
Comment linking /blog/bpf-ebpf-xdp-and-bpfilter-what-are-these-things-and-what-do-they-mean-enterprise/
on “Kernel-Bypass Networking”Some interesting metrics on bpfilter, especially when combined with smart network card offloading https://www.netronome.com/blog/bpf-ebpf-xdp-and-bpfilter-wha...
Comment linking /blog/bpf-ebpf-xdp-and-bpfilter-what-are-these-things-and-what-do-they-mean-enterprise/
on “BPF comes to firewalls”Not them but I would assumes SoC is System on (a) Chip, and ebnf may be a typo of eBPF (in the context of eBPF offloading to perform filtering on the NIC [1]) [1] https://www.netronome.com/media/documents/eBPF_HW_OFFLOAD_HN...
Comment linking /media/documents/eBPF_HW_OFFLOAD_HNiMne8_2_.pdf
on “Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer”