A new OASIS technical committee is being formed. The Infrastructure Data-Plane Function (IDPF) Technical Committee (TC) has been proposed by the members of OASIS listed in the charter below. The TC name, statement of purpose, scope, list of deliverables, audience, IPR mode and language specified in this proposal will constitute the TC's official charter. Submissions of technology for consideration by the TC, and the beginning of technical discussions, may occur no sooner than the TC's first meeting.
The eligibility requirements for becoming a participant in the TC at the first meeting are:
(a) you must be an employee or designee of an OASIS member organization or an individual member of OASIS, and
(b) you must join the Technical Committee, which members may do by using the Roster "join group: link on the TC's web page at [a].
To be considered a voting member at the first meeting:
(a) you must join the Technical Committee at least 7 days prior to the first meeting (on or before 08 December 2022; and
(b) you must attend the first meeting of the TC, at the time and date fixed below (15 December 2022).
Participants also may join the TC at a later time. OASIS and the TC welcomes all interested parties.
Non-OASIS members who wish to participate may contact us about joining OASIS [b]. In addition, the public may access the information resources maintained for each TC: a mail list archive, document repository and public comments facility, which will be linked from the TC's public home page at [c].
Please feel free to forward this announcement to any other appropriate lists. OASIS is an open standards organization; we encourage your participation.
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[a] https://www.oasis-open.org/apps/org/workgroup/idpf/
[b] See http://www.oasis-open.org/join/
[c] https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=idpf
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âCALL FOR PARTICIPATIONâ
Infrastructure Data-Plane Function (IDPF) Technical Committee Charter
The charter for this TC is as follows.
(1)(a) TC Name
Infrastructure Data-Plane Function (IDPF) TC
(1)(b) Statement of Purpose
This project defines a standardized, multi-vendor PCIe Network Data-plane Function Device.
Compliant implementations provide high throughput over Ethernet and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), allow live migration and decoupling of Tenants and Data center operator Infrastructure operations.
Devices can be composed in any manner desired, including support for Single-root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), Scalable I/O Virtualization (SIOV), or fully/partially emulated devices
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The project defines the Host Interface, Device Behavior, setup, and configuration flows. The result can be presented to the Operating system as a physical Function (PF) or a virtual function (VF) PCIe device, as needed.
The purpose of this project is to define a standardized Network Data-Plane Function PCIe device that satisfies multiple goals:
- High throughput/low-overhead operation
- Remove most of the CPU cost of emulated interfaces
- Decouple Tenant and data-center operations
 * Zero downtime for Tenants while Datacenter operator is free to bring down server for maintenance
 * Allow live migration of tenants and data-center service nodes
- Standardized interface for scalability and ease of configuration and operation
- Offer Tenants to be offered additional features and accelerations to keep up evolving demands
- Feature negotiation and extensibility to allow scalable provisioning and orchestration
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None of the standard interfaces available in the market today provide for all of these needs at once.
This project aims to complement rather than supplant the work of the Virtual IO Device (VirtIO) OASIS TC, providing for accelerated development by focusing exclusively on PCI Express hardware implementations (and their equivalent SW emulated devices) and on the networking functionality.
To facilitate and promote cooperation between the two projects, IDPF TC member companies are encouraged to also be members of the VirtIO TC, and Contributors of material comments will also be encouraged to cross-post their comments to the VirtIO TC comments mailing list
Business Benefits
This project is aimed at meeting the needs of
- Operators of large data centers (especially public cloud service providers), and their Tenants
- Vendors of Host-attached networking devices (Network Interface Cards (NICs), Accelerators, etc.)
Having a Multi-vendor Standard device allows both sides to scale their efforts, and make them more efficient:
- Vendors can avoid per-customer customization while still allowing feature extensibility and âsecret sauceâ differentiation
- Datacenter operators will have a scalable solution that can be orchestrated as a generic good, avoiding the need for per-supplier customization and constraints. i.e. make Host-attached networking devices more uniform in treatment, while still getting maximum performance and minimum coupling to a specific vendor or product version/generation.
- Tenants will be able to get high-throughput feature-rich networking connectivity, over standard transports, while being decoupled from the Datacenter operator concerns and constraints Â
(1)(c) Scope
Scope of the TC
1. Interface & behavioral model of an IDPF device as seen by an IDPF driver
2. Application Programming Interface (API) & Descriptor formats
3. Initialization/reset, configuration & Operational Flows
4. Base IDPF specification + Capability Discover/Negotiation mechanism
Out of scope for TC work are
1. Testing framework for any specific Deviceâs Compliance
2. Code/Specification for any Offloading service not part of the base IDPF specification (i.e. Per-vendor/Per-case Extensions)
(1)(d) Deliverables
The TC will deliver
1. A specification of the Interface and Behavioral model of an IDPF-conformant device
 * 1st Draft to be submitted to TC soon after formation
2. A reference Software (SW) Device
 * 12m after TC formation
3. A reference IDPF driver
 * Intel/Google Device driver soon after TC formation
 * (if Needed) Driver for Reference Device : 12m after TC formation
(1)(e) IPR Mode
TC will follow the Non-Assertion mode
(1)(f) Audience
Networking SW architects & Implementers Â
Operating Systems (O/S) device Driver Writers
PCIe Network-cards, Infrastructure Processing Units (IPUâs) and Accelerator vendors
Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMâs) & Original System/Software Vendors (OSVâs)
O/S Vendors
Data-center Operators
(1)(g) Language
TCâs language will be English
Section 2: Additional Information
(2)(a) Identification of Similar Work
This project draws inspiration from
- Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) â a standard multi-vendor PCIe storage device
- Virtual IO Device (virtIO) and Especially Virtio-Net track
The project is aimed at allowing communication over Ethernet and RDMA transports
- Ethernet â IEEE802.3
- RDMA
- RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)
2)(b) First TC Meeting
TC meeting will be held Virtually on Dec 15th
(2)(c) Ongoing Meeting Schedule
TC will carry out its work by Electronic communications, with no mandatory Face to Face, in-person attendance.
TC members may modify this later
(2)(d) TC Proposers
* Prashant Chandra/Google  prchandra@google.com
* Prasun Kapoor/Marvell pkapoor@marvell.com
* Michael S. Tsrikin/Redhat   mst@redhat.com
* Anjali Singhai Jain/Intel anjali.singhai@intel.com
* Don Skidmore/Intel donald.c.skidmore@intel.com
* Sridhar Samudrala/intel sridhar.samudrala@intel.com
* Keren Guy/Intel keren.guy@intel.com
(2)(e) Primary Representatives' Support
* Mrs. Katalin Bartfai-Walcott Âkatalin.kb.walcott@intel.com: ÂAs OASIS primary representative for Intel, I confirm our support for the proposed IDPF TC charter and endorse our participant listed above
* Prashant Chandra Âprchandra@google.com :Â As OASIS primary representative for Google, I confirm our support for the proposed IDPF TC charter and endorse our participant listed above.
* I, Cary Ussery, cussery@marvell.com, as OASIS primary representative for Marvell, confirm our support for the IDPF TC and our participants listed above as named co-proposers.
* Dr. Mark Little, mlittle@redhat.com, as Primary representative for Redhat, I confirm our support for the proposed IDPF TC charter and endorse our participant listed above
(2)(f) TC Convener
Michael Orr  Â
michael.orr@intel.com
Intel NCNG Strategy & Roadmap office
(2)(g) Anticipated Contributions
Work done jointly by Google & Intel will be contributed to the TC as a starting point for the work. Â
(2)(i) FAQ Document
N/A (yet)
(2)(j) Work Product Titles and Acronyms
IDPF specification
IDPF Driver
IDPF Reference DeviceÂÂ
ChetÂEnsignChief Technical Community Steward OASIS Open | Â | Â | Â |
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