Realistically the work Ironic has completed this cycle is to enable an operator to execute steps against a node and a DPU as part of the same deployment operation. This work is unrelated to past work in ironic to support "smart nics" (the original marketing name used for DPUs), which was more about the deploy time networking interactions. Unfortunately, we're not entirely there as most of this was the underlying substrate and workflow capabilities. We expect this to begin to be extended to aspects such as firmware management of the DPU, and we already have reports of operators using ironic separately to deploy the OS on some DPU models. The issue is before now, they were entirely disjointed. We expect this to improve over the next few years, but is also going to take standardization across the DPU vendor market to really enable. The OPI[0] community is working on trying to drive standardization, but many of the features and requirements being discussed will likely force revision in the silicon, in other words it might be a few years before we see the standardization we're trying to drive there reach a usable state. That being said, we anticipate continued work in Caracal. [0]: https://opiproject.org/ On Tue, Sep 19, 2023 at 2:49 PM Kendall Nelson <kennelson11@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello folks!
So, as the OpenInfra Foundation has begun putting together the release marking materials for the Bobcat release, we noticed a trend focused on enabling hardware and increasing utilization. Ironic in particular had an excellent cycle highlight about DPUs[1]. We wanted to quickly reach out and see if there were any cycle highlights that projects maybe haven't published in a review, but are related to this topic. Please respond ASAP as we are moving fast on finalizing the press release.
Also, if there is anything related coming in Caracal, we might be able to call that out as well, though I know it's quite early to know what might be landing in 2024.1.
If there are other cycle highlights that should get called out as well, definitely push the patches and add me as a reviewer!
-Kendall Nelson
[1] https://releases.openstack.org/bobcat/highlights.html#ironic