> the ConnectX-6 Dx network card
I would caution people against using the Mellanox/NVIDIA network interface cards in anything they care about. The driver license is proprietary and you have to build it for your kernel as a DKMS module in a semi manual process. Makes future system updates a real bother. I realize this probably doesn't apply so much to FB internally since they build and maintain their own distro in house.
Stuff that's just a couple of years old won't even build the driver for current debian bullseye. Have to run buster? No thanks.
As with so many other things NVIDIA the root cause of this is their absurd licensing approach to open source software and drivers for their hardware.
I’ve been wondering about SmartNICs recently and imagine all sorts of ideas for them. Which brand do you recommended?
> Makes future system updates a real bother.
Sounds like their GPU drivers too.
It comes from solarflare who have a long pedigree of low-latency smartnics. They used to supply Cloudflare, and also supply like 50% of fintechs/financial markets.
You can also just use openonload to accelerate your programs. In this case just doing straight linux socket programming, which can be accelerated without dpdk. Or just use the open source linux net driver if necessary.