This month we introduce to you Antonin Bas, a software developer who was one of thefirst dozen employees at Barefoot Networks (recently acquired by Intel). If you have done anything related to P4 then you have probably used something created by Antonin – he was the creator of the open source ecosystem around P4 with his initial contributions.
Antonin’s contributions to P4 and Stratum are many and wide-ranging. Antonin
- made the first contributions to what would become P4.org
- wrote the first P4 compiler frontend
- is the main contributor to the P4 software switch (bmv2), which focuses on P4 language compliance to enable development / debugging of P4 data planes and control planes
- is the main contributor to the PTF testing framework, adapted from OFTest, and which is widely used to test P4 data planes with a variety of control plane interfaces: it is used by ONF to test fabric.p4 and all SAI community tests are actually built on PTF
- as a co-chair of the P4 API Working Group, has spearheaded the design of the P4Runtime control-plane API which was adopted as one of the Stratum northbound interfaces. He has also been very active in P4Runtime implementation efforts, and contributed a framework – called PI – which streamlines P4Runtime implementation on programmable devices
- contributed the P4Runtime shell, which enables convenient debugging of network devices implementing P4Runtime (This is a very recent contribution, take a look and give it a try: https://github.com/p4lang/p4runtime-shell)
- contributed to Stratum support for bmv2 and the Barefoot Tofino ASICs
- participated in many P4 presentations / tutorials / demos / workshops throughout the years to help popularize the P4 ecosystem
Antonin is currently working on many activities, but has a focus on finding/building/demonstrating/evangelizing interesting applications that are enabled by the P4 language and ecosystem of tools.
When Antonin wants to unwind a bit, he likes to play video games or participate in the rousing games of table tennis that Barefoot is known for. He has a big milestone coming up in July when he is getting married! He let me know that his fiancée is also in high tech and loves to play video games – sounds like a great match!
Congratulations Antonin, and thank you for your many contributions to the ONF ecosystem projects.