NVIDIA Mellanox SN4800 Modular Switch Support Prepared For Linux 5.19

[Developer12]

Uh oh. Somebody sure is cranky.

Yes, I figured you were hyping up the Ethernet controller. Even in 2008, that was probably commodity IP they didn't even bother to design in-house. Furthermore, there's no lineage connecting that effort to anything they're selling today. It's merely an incidental similarity.

Mellanox is a company they spent $7B to acquire, which mostly wiped out their cash reserves, IIRC. They didn't decide to do that because of some nostalgia for the days when they made nForce chipsets. It was part of their play for datacenter dominance.

The point is that they've made stuff with ethernet before. Lots of different things, in fact. They're not just "the GPU company."

If that wiped their cash reserves what were they doing trying to buy ARM?

[coder]

Wifi routers run linux.

A wifi router is a lot more sophisticated and feature-rich than an Ethernet switch!

Even hard drives and SSDs run linux these days.

I've heard that. Not sure if it was from you or someone else, but I'm curious why you believe this to be the case and whether it's any specific drives or most/all of them.

The reason I'm skeptical is that Linux doesn't have the fastest boot times, the lightest footprint or HW requirements, nor is it ideally suited for low latency. Furthermore, it's a heck of a lot more general than what HDDs or SSDs actually need. Finally, its sheer size leaves lots of places for bugs to hide.

[coder]

They're not just "the GPU company."

Yes. Besides datacenter/AI and HPC, they're also making complete systems for self-driving cars & robotics.

If that wiped their cash reserves what were they doing trying to buy ARM?

The Mellanox acquisition was announced in early 2019, while the ARM acquisition was announced about 1.5 years later. In between, we had a mining craze and the pandemic-fueled, historic GPU shortage. So, I'm sure that recharged their wallet, to some degree.

Even then, the ARM acquisition was largely for stock shares. So much of it was in the form of stock that I think the value of the deal went from $40B to about $70B, by the time it was scuttled, purely on the basis of the change in Nvidia's stock price.

[Developer12]

A wifi router is a lot more sophisticated and feature-rich than an Ethernet switch!

Not really. Dirty secret of networking: Switches do all the same jobs as routers but at level 2, and only within a network segment. In ye olde days, every switch was a large power-hungry bit of gear with a full 68k computer and OS inside.

I've heard that. Not sure if it was from you or someone else, but I'm curious why you believe this to be the case and whether it's any specific drives or most/all of them.

The reason I'm skeptical is that Linux doesn't have the fastest boot times, the lightest footprint or HW requirements, nor is it ideally suited for low latency. Furthermore, it's a heck of a lot more general than what HDDs or SSDs actually need. Finally, its sheer size leaves lots of places for bugs to hide.

I've read _numerous_ writeups of people getting access to these devices' shells. One hard drive in particular turned out to be SMP.

Why did you think WD put in the effort to port the K210 to linux, with no MMU support? Unikernels all the way down. You should know by now that chips that can run linux practically grow on trees, Linux's generality is what makes it attractive over custom firmware, and that all storage devices grow more sophisticated by the day.

[Developer12]

Yes. Besides datacenter/AI and HPC, they're also making complete systems for self-driving cars & robotics.

And chipsets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar...Force_chipsets

[coder]

Dirty secret of networking: Switches do all the same jobs as routers but at level 2, and only within a network segment.

Well, I've been out of the networking business for about 20 years, but BITD, there was a big difference. Somebody once told me it took up to an hour to reboot some of the biggest routers.

One hard drive in particular turned out to be SMP.

Even in the mid-2000's, I got a Maxtor HDD with a good IOPS rate that was dual-core. I know SSDs have used multi-core controllers, for a long time. But SMP isn't as exotic as it used to be. I'm sure lots of embedded OSes and RTOSes support SMP.

[coder]

And chipsets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar...Force_chipsets

No, you can see they were already exiting that business by about 2009. The last product on that page was released in 2010.

The end of that era probably came about with their decision to make a strategic turn towards mobile SoCs, which they've since dropped.

[Developer12]

No, you can see they were already exiting that business by about 2009. The last product on that page was released in 2010.

The end of that era probably came about with their decision to make a strategic turn towards mobile SoCs, which they've since dropped.

Didn't say they were still making them, merely that they had. They get up to all kinds of stuff.

[Developer12]

Well, I've been out of the networking business for about 20 years, but BITD, there was a big difference. Somebody once told me it took up to an hour to reboot some of the biggest routers.

Brush up on your hello messages and spanning tree protocol. It's routing, but with a bunch of funny names.