Is the Evolution of PNA still ongoing

[Tommy-jx]

HI,

Is the Evolution of PNA still ongoing?

According the specification of verion v0.7(https://p4.org/p4-spec/docs/PNA-v0.7.html) released on 2022-12-22, I can find descriptions like:

1. "Significant changes are expected to be made before version 1.0",
2. "The details of how one can use P4 to program the message processing portion of a NIC is left as a future extension of this specification"
   
   But comparing the latest version with v0.7, only minor differences can be found, so I'm wondering if this model is still Evolving?

[jafingerhut]

Progress has definitely been slower than I would like. Reasons include:

1. It is difficult to come to consensus on low level details that are close to the hardware among hardware vendors that have independently designed ASICs. Even small differences can lead to quite different preferences in how P4 programs should be written to enable P4 compilers to efficiently map the source code to the hardware target.

2. Everyone most interested in this project have full time jobs enhancing their proprietary development tools for their platform. All of the work done here is on a volunteer basis, with the results given away, and there is not always a strong connection between this specification being fleshed out, vs. sales of one's own product.

That said, there has been some interest expressed by some of the participants to continue and see if we can come to consensus on more details here, e.g. exactly how to express packet recirculation, and the much larger new task of defining a "message processing" portion of PNA near to the host interface that can programmably implement features like segmentation or reassembly, RDMA, etc.