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S01 E24
29 Nov 2021/01:14:45

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
  • [@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!