Network Interface Cards (NIC) offer increasingly complex features, such as crypto and tunneling offload. Deployment at scale has rigorous operating requirements for performance, scalability and telemetry. NIC features have historically lacked clear specifications that cover these, resulting in mutually inconsistent and sometimes unusable implementations.
Vendors and users alike benefit from a large competitive marketplace. The OCP NIC software project brings together stakeholders to propose NIC features and reach consensus on unambiguous specifications, in an open and unencumbered form. We publish these specs along with conformance tests for vendors to self-certify.
Active topics include telemetry, crypto offload, TCP pacing offload, tunneling offload and high frequency PTP timestamping. We actively invite proposals for other features in planning, development or deployment. Bring your own ideas, critique others, share deployment experiences and help define the ecosystem in the new Networking API Workstream.
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Workstream is led by Willem De Bruijn (Google) and Jakub Kicinski (Meta).
Networking Mailing List: Subscribe now.
Networking Project: The next call is on May 9th (see calendar on project page). Attend calls - membership is not required.
Networking Software wiki: Work in progress and more details on the workstream.
Attend the OCP Networking Tech Talk on May 10-11-12th. Register here.
For the NIC software specific talk, where we dive into the technical details of crypto offload for QUIC and TCP/IP, this will take place May 10th at 9am PT.