The DPU Network Operator along side the SR-IOV Network Operator code for these features

• OvS HWOL For Smart NICs
• Switchdev Mode
• Tenant Cluster Bootstraping

Are currently vendor locked to NVIDIA MLX NICs. The code assumes the NIC are MLX.

 - SMFS/DMFS Modes are NVIDIA specific technologies.

 - Other naming conventions mention NVIDIA specifics.

Smart-NICs and DPUs are also cluster locked to OCP only. We use Openshift Machine Config Operator to configure the NVIDIA NIC. Although at times, we must rely on the Machine Config Operator to perform work before certain services (e.g. OvS) starts up, some code can be moved to an abstract class based hierarchy based on vendors.

Currently DPU Network Operator is downstream only. It may be necessary to promote the DPU Network Operator to become part of an upstream community.