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P4 is a domain-specific language designed to allow programming of protocol-independent packet processors. Behavioral Model v2 (BMv2) is the reference P4 software switch. Initial support for this type of device has been included into ONOS 1.6 (Goldeneye) with the goal of providing 2 goals: i) provide the research community with a platform to experiment with P4-based applications and ii) define a common groundwork to support programmable data planes in the next versions of ONOS.
This document will guide you through the necessary steps to program a network of BMv2 (virtual) devices using ONOS. This document assumes you are already familiar with ONOS, P4 and BMv2. In other words, we assume you already know how to run ONOS locally, write a P4 program, compile it for BMv2, build and run BMv2.
Contributors
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By using ONOS 1.6, you'll be able to program a network of BMv2 devices with all the benefits of a logically centralized SDN platform. The following features are currently supported:
- Device discovery: connection / disconnection events
JSON configuration swap
Packet-ins and packet-outs
Match-action table population (via flow rule/objective/intent service)
Port statistics collections
Flow statistics collection
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On the southbound, ONOS speaks with BMv2 using Thrift. This project has been based on a customized version of the BMv2 “simple_switch” target that, differently from the original one, supports primitives to send packet-in events to the controller and to receive and transmit packet-outs. The source code of onos-bmv2 is available here.
BMv2 device context
In order to enforce a given JSON configuration on a given device, applications need to provide a “BMv2 Device Context”. Device contexts are used to bind together in a Java class a BMv2 JSON configuration and an “Interpreter” implementation. Interpreters are used by ONOS to “understand” a given P4 program. They provide a mapping between ONOS objects and program-specific P4 objects (e.g. headers, actions, table names, etc.), allowing existing services and apps (e.g. host tracking, LLDP discovery, ARP proxy, reactive forwarding, etc.) to work with virtually any P4 program.
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When devices connect for the first time to ONOS a “default” context is automatically applied, triggering a device configuration swap on the device and exposing to the system a default interpreter. Such a context is used to provide a minimum set of data plane capabilities for basic ONOS services and apps to work. The default context is based on a default.json BMv2 configuration, (compiled from default.p4) and a default interpreter implementation.
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