Request for Open-Sourcing P4Insight GUI

[Orangezzt]

Hello,

First, thank you for the incredible work on the SDE and the ongoing efforts to open-source the simulation model and related tools. It’s greatly appreciated by the community.

I noticed that the P4Insight GUI, which is a valuable tool for visualizing hardware resource usage after P4 program compilation, is not yet open-sourced. As mentioned in the repository documentation, P4.org personnel are in communication with Intel regarding its open-source release.

Could you provide an update on the progress of this effort? The P4Insight GUI would be a significant addition to the open-source ecosystem, enabling developers to better understand and optimize their P4 programs for Tofino ASICs.

If there are any blockers or challenges in making this tool open-source, it would be helpful to understand them. The community is eager to contribute and support this initiative in any way possible.

Thank you for your time and consideration!

[jafingerhut]

I and a few other people from P4.org joined together to write a request for P4Insight and several other things not yet released by Intel, e.g. some Tofino documentation, and sent it to a prominent Intel manager on 2025-Jan-23. The list was fairly extensive. Even if it were short, it can easily take a significant amount of time to check things with multiple teams internally to reach approval (or final "sorry, we give up") status. This repository's README "What is included" section will definitely be updated if what is included vs. what is not changes.

[jafingerhut]

Update from 2025-Feb-21: I spoke with Deb Chatterjee, a manager at Intel, earlier today. He gave me an update on his top two priorities for releasing new Tofino code from Intel that he is currently working on. They are:

(a) talking with the companies that developed the driver code for the Tofino serdes. If they cannot convince those companies to let intel release the source code of those drivers, their next approach is to try to convince them to let Intel release those drivers as binary shared libraries, e.g. Linux .so shared object files. It sounds like this is an ongoing discussion, with no success yet.

(b) Arranging to release the source code of the P4 Insight tool to open source. Again, this is an ongoing task, not completed yet.

[Orangezzt]

For a p4 program, if I just want to know how many stages it occupies, how can I get this from the bf_drivers.log obtained from the run?

bf_drivers.log

[ChrisDodd]

There's no way to get that from the driver log, as far as I know. The easiest way is probably if you can find the .bfa (intermediate) file generated by the compiler -- that describes the programming of each stage, so you can see which stages have anything in them and which do not.

[Orangezzt]

Thanks very much! I found it. But if I want to know the stages occupied by a certain Match-Action Table and the TCAM and SRAM consumed in this stage, which file should I look for this in?