They just have UEFI on them. You should be able to install a regular distribution w/o a separate BSP.

BlueField-1 never was really widely available. Was more of a trial balloon rather than the deployed product that BF2 onwards are. The latter has easily publicly available software.

Probably even worse now that ‘AI’ has hit; since the shiny new business area is so big and so high-value relative to the legacy stuff that they can probably make especially dramatic arguments about the cost of supporting legacy and non-core products.

Beyond just Nvidia, though, ‘DPU’ in general seems like an area ripe for hardware abandonment. A lot more going on than more typical NICs, so anywhere between “there’s a fairly punchy embedded ARM device just burning watts here” and “there’s a dangerously outdated Linux appliance grafted into my server’s brainstem” if nobody is keeping an eye on the firmware (not just the old “oh, yeah, XYZ 10-40GB NIC pulls are crazy cheap vs. the ones based on the other chipset because RoCEv2 is basically a lie never try to enable it unless you like crashes” type abandoned NIC problems); and since so many of the offerings are either relatively early days or very closely tied to some specific hyperscaler’s pet project there’s not necessarily a lot of support hammered out (whether in the form of a relatively generic Linux BSP or a project more specifically aimed at making hardware agnostic management easier like SONiC or OpenBMC) if a vendor has lost interest in a device or you aren’t the intended customer.

I’ll be interested to see whether that gets smoothed out over time, if it’s mostly just a maturity problem; or whether the people who actually buy these things are basically OK with it because adding some powerful offload capabilities and smooshing much of the management plane responsibilities of the BMC into the system’s biggest NIC is reducing the amount of complexity they have to deal with and the ability of the secondary market and small scale operators to deal with it is not their problem.

It will also be interesting to see how ‘silicon root of trust’ appearing on all the spec sheets ends up shaking out. I can understand why people want that; but, depending on implementation, that could either be some relatively light-touch measured boot stuff(or heavier touch all-signed secure boot stuff that gets wiped during decommissioning or ships in customer provisioning mode); or it could involve a lot of expensive hardware aging like an Android handset.