Technologies for control plane separation in a network interface controller

One or more non-transitory machine-readable storage media comprising a plurality of instructions stored thereon that, in response to being executed, cause a compute device to:

• transmit, by at least one of a plurality of resources of the compute device, control plane requests to a physical function managed by a network interface controller (NIC) coupled with the compute device,
• wherein circuitry of the NIC has established a data plane separate from a control plane for access to the physical function,
• wherein the control plane includes a trusted control path and an untrusted control path,
• wherein to transmit the control plane requests includes to transmit the control plane requests via one of the trusted control path or the untrusted control path based on a trust level associated with the physical function, the trust level used to determine whether the physical function is an untrusted physical function with restricted access to hardware of the NIC, and
• wherein control plane requests transmitted via the trusted control path towards trusted physical functions are to be managed by a trusted control path controller circuitry, while control plane requests transmitted via the untrusted control path towards untrusted physical functions are to be managed by an untrusted control path controller.

A method for control plane separation at a network interface controller (NIC), the method comprising:

• transmitting, by at least one of a plurality of resources of a compute device, control plane requests to a physical function managed by a network interface controller (NIC) coupled with the compute device,
• wherein circuitry of the NIC has established a data plane separate from a control plane for access to the physical function,
• wherein the control plane includes a trusted control path and an untrusted control path,
• wherein transmitting the control plane requests includes to transmit the control plane requests via one of the trusted control path or the untrusted control path based on a trust level associated with the physical function, the trust level used to determine whether the physical function is an untrusted physical function with restricted access to hardware of the NIC, and
• wherein control plane requests transmitted via the trusted control path towards trusted physical functions are to be managed by a trusted control path controller circuitry, while control plane requests transmitted via the untrusted control path towards untrusted physical functions are to be managed by an untrusted control path controller.