If NetFPGA gives you access to the PCI bus, it should be possible to make it into a NIC.

Simple matter of some verilog and a linux driver. ;-)

Of course, we also have non-FPGA Smart NICs from the likes of Netronome, etc. which can do things like accelerate EBPF or run P4.

Well, we're planning on porting Corundum to the NetFPGA SUME hardware at some point in the near future. Should be relatively straightforward as the PCIe interface on the Virtex 7 is the same as on the Ultrascale parts.

NetFPGA does have a NIC reference design, but AFAIK it's just the Xilinx XDMA core connected to a Xilinx 10G MAC. No accessible transmit scheduler, no offloading of any kind, etc. Just about as spartan as you can get, and it's built from completely closed components so you can't really make many modifications to it.

For what we're doing, we can't use any existing commercial NICs or smart NICs because they can't provide the precision we need in terms of controlling transmit timing. We don't care about EBPF, P4, etc. We care about PTP synchronized packet transmission with microsecond precision.