This tutorial is based on a number of tools developed as part of the P4 foundation and the NGSDN tutorial repos.
The tutorial consists of three task:
- Basic Forwarding with P4: this tutorial will allow you to exercise your P4 language knowledge and understand some key characteristics of the language.
- P4 network calculator: This tutorial will get you to work with the control plane of the P4 language.
- Stateful Network Firewall (optional): This is an advanced tutorial that provide insights on how to manage stateful information in a P4 switch.
Similar to the OpenFlow tutorial, the P4 tutorial is based on a Mininet running multiple P4 switch. We provide a devcontainer environment that contains all the required tools to run the tutorial.
The tooling for this tutorial will be based on software maintained by the P4
foundation. p4c is a P4 compiler, that can translate P4 programs into
different configuration for packet processing runtimes. Furthermore, we use a
modified version of the Mininet framework that adds support for the P4
Behavioural Model v2 switch, a reference implementation of the P4 switch
specifications.
In order to simplify the P4 development, we provide you with a Makefile that automates some several tasks. The action that you can execute are:
- make p4-build: This action will compile the file p4src/main.p4 in the
respective exercise window and generate the required switch pipeline files in
the folder
p4src/build, i.e., the p4src/build/bmv2.json (The specification file for the switch), and ithep4src/build/p4info.txt (Required to generate the p4 bindinds., and p4src/build/p4info.txt ()) files. - make proto-build: Generate the python bindings to run a GRPC client that can
connect to the P4 switch. The binding are required to run the
util/simple_controller.py, a Python executable that allows you to inject custom flows into a running P4 switch. is will stop the whole Mininet instance and you will have to restart.
Now that you became familiar with the toolchain of this tutorial you can start working on the first exercise. Just open the exercise1/README.md to figure out what you have to.