In recent years Linux networking started evolving at an amazing pace. You can hear about all the cool new stuff at netdev conference… or listen to Episode 94 of Software Gone Wild to get a CliffsNotes version.

Roopa Prabhu, Jamal Hadi Salim, and Tom Herbert joined Nick Buraglio and myself and we couldn’t help diverging into the beauties of tc, and the intricacies of low-latency forwarding before coming back on track and started discussing cool stuff like:

• af_xdp (another fast-speed packet forwarding in user-mode processes);
• hardware abstraction layers like tc;
• BPF code offload into high-end NICs, or smart offload of tc policies into older NICs;
• why we’d need yet-another abstraction layer like P4;
• switch ASIC API, how it works, and how switch ASIC API evolved over time.

Interested?