Any Intel NIC with Mellanox E-Switch like functionality?

[cromo]

For the info on E-Switch, here's from Mellanox:

39. NVIDIA MLX5 Ethernet Driver — Data Plane Development Kit 24.03.0 documentation

Basically I want to be able to have my WiFi AP (with VLANs) connected to NIC port 1 talk to a passive switch connected to port 2 and all the SR-IOV virtual functions on either of these ports. Is this doable?

I know I can achieve the same using just a regular switch, but that's something I currently do (ConnectX LX 4, 10Gbit DAC, 10Gbit active switch) and want to scale it down to cut on power usage. The devices connected to switch would be low-traffic ones with no VLAN, so being able to leverage a switch built into the NIC itself would be a perfect solution for my needs.

 

[cromo]

Replying to myself, but it seems it is not possible:

I350 Controller - bridging ports together

With the I350, or any other Intel 2-port or 4-port NIC, is it possible to bridge 2 of the ports together using the Intel controller, and not a Host software bridge? I want all of the bridge processing to occur in the Intel controller - the host should only configure and bring up the bridge...

community.intel.com

Forward packets between SR-IOV Virtual Function (VF) NICs

I have an Intel 82599ES 10G NIC which supports Intel SR-IOV. I have successfully created 8 virtual functions (VF) of it and assigned to 2 qemu/kvm VMs (2 VFs per each VM). Both of the VMs run DPDK

stackoverflow.com

 

[Civiloid]

I know I can achieve the same using just a regular switch, but that's something I currently do (ConnectX LX 4, 10Gbit DAC, 10Gbit active switch) and want to scale it down to cut on power usage.

I doubt it would cut power consumption by much. In my experience, ConnectX 4-5-6 consumes about the same amount of power if you up the port, and they only a few ways to save power. You would save a bit on copy to mem, cpu processing, and copy to the card, but on modern systems, 10 Gbps can be routed (simple routing) in low power mode, so pretty much you would save 1-2W of power if you'll be able to make a bridge on the NIC.

Modern switches might consume less than just powering up a second port on a card (depends on a switch though). Of course you can play with that and just create a bridge with whatever OS provides and see if that brings your power consumption down...

 

[cromo]

In my experience, ConnectX 4-5-6 consumes about the same amount of power if you up the port, and they only a few ways to save power

Maybe should have been a bit more elaborate explaining my use case.

My 4 LX consumes a whooping 14W with a single DAC connected, despite ASPM and all power saving enabled.

My idea is to get rid of 4 LX altogether and switch to Ethernet. 2 ports on the NIC, 2 x 1Gbps. One of those would be for Ubiquity Pro 6 AP (with VLAN), which is 1Gbps max anyway but handles most of the traffic, and the other one would be for a dummy 1gbps switch. Considering my managed 10Gbps switch also consumes some 10W right now, I would hope to shave off at least 10-15W with this.

It would be perfect if I could somehow get the NICs themselves do the bridging, but as established, this is rather not possible. So the alternative is software bridging, but I don't like the added latencies — which is the actual reason for not using a software bridge, not the in-hardware vs software switching power consumption.

Another alternative is to use a single 2.5Gbps NIC and a 2.5Gbps managed switch. Or a X710 with a DAC and much lower consumption than LX 4, and an existing switch. It's more of a KISS solution, but still an overkill for my needs.