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P4 is a programming language to define the behavior of the data plane, it can be used to program targets such as software switches, reconfigurable ASICs or FPGA-based NICsFPGAs, or it can be used to formally specify the behavior of a fixed-function switch. P4 Runtime P4Runtime is a protocol to control at runtime the behavior of a P4-enabled data plane device. This page presents the support for P4 and P4 Runtime in ONOS, moreover, we provide defined pipeline, for example, to install entries in a match+action table defined in the P4 program. This page provides steps to set up an environment to try ONOS with the Behavioral Model v2 (BMv2) (the reference P4 software switch). Support for P4 Runtime P4Runtime has been included in ONOS starting from the 1.11 (Loon) release.

This document assumes you are already familiar with ONOS, P4, P4 Runtime and BMv2. In other words, we assume you already know how to build and run ONOS, write a P4 program, build and run BMv2 with P4 Runtime supportP4Runtime and BMv2. If this is not the case, here's a list of pointers to get started:

• What's ONOS?
• ONOS Administrator Guide
• ONOS Developer Guide
• P4 white paper
• P4 language specification
• BMv2 slides at 2016 P4 workshop
• P4Runtime resources

Table of Contents

Overview

For an overview of how P4 and P4Runtime are supported in ONOS, please refer to this presentation (ONF Connect, December 2018):

Click here to open the slides in a new window

Video recording

Features at a Glance

By using ONOS, you'll be able to program and control a network of comprising P4Runtime-enabled devices with all the benefits of a logically centralized SDN platform. The following features are currently supported:

• Device discovery

• P4 pipeline provisioning (ad at device connection)

• Match-action table operations (via existing ONOS APIs such as FlowRule, FlowObjective, or Intent)
• Action profile group/member operations (via Group ONOS API)

• PacketController packet-ins in and packet-outsout

• Counter reads

ONOS+P4 Developer VM

We have created a special VM with all you need to test P4Runtime support in ONOS.

You can use the following link to download an Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) package to be imported using VirtualBox or any other x86 virtualization system that supports this format.

Pre-built OVA package Click here to download the ONOS+P4 Developer VM (approx. 32.5 GB):http://onlab.vicci.org/onos/onos-p4-dev.ova (last updated 2019-05-16)

Alternatively, you can use these instructions to build a VM locally using Vagrant.

VM Contents

The VM is based on Ubuntu 1618.04 (servercloud image) and contains the following software pre-installed:

• ONOS
• BMv2 simple_switch_grpc (P4 software switch with P4Runtime support)
• p4c (P4 compiler)
• Mininet (network emulator)

Recommended

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System Requirements

The VM is configured with 4 GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores, while the disk has size of approx. 8 GB. For a flawless experience, we recommend running the VM on a host system that has at least the double of resources.

These are the recommended minimum requirements to be able to run a Mininet network with 1-10 BMv2 devices controlled by 1 ONOS instance. To emulate larger networks with multiple instances of ONOS (for example using onos.py), we recommend configuring the VM to use at least 4 CPU cores.

VM

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Connectivity

The VM comes with two network interfaces: a NATed interface that provides access to internet (eth0), and a host-only one (eth1). Once you are able to access the VM, use ifconfig (or your command of choice) to get the IP address of the host-only interface. You will need that later to SSH or access the ONOS GUI from your host system. Alternatively, if your host system supports zeroconf networking via mDNS (e.g. Bonjour in OS X, or Avahi in Linux) then you can use the hostname onos-p4-dev.local to access the VM. For example, to SSH into the VM's guest system:

$ ssh sdn@onos-p4-dev.local

Important: interface
Interface naming inside the VM is not guaranteed, please use your linux/networking/VirtualBox skills to figure out which interface is the host-only one. It should be the one named eth1, but that's not guaranteed. Similarly, make sure that VirtualBox is configured correctly such that the host-only interface can ping your host system.

Important 2: 
Without trying to tell you how to live your life, we do reccomend recommend for your convenience to set up SSH access to the VM (e.g. copying SSH keys for faster access), as you will need to use multiple terminal shells at the same time. The Ubuntu system in the VM comes already equipped with an SSH server on port 22.

Known issues

• VirtualBox shared folders are not mounted on startup on Ubuntu 18.04 even if "auto-mount" flag is set. To fix it 

  Code Block
  language bash
  $ sudo systemctl edit --full vboxadd-service

  and remove systemd-timesync.service from the Conflicts= line, then reboot (source)

Walkthrough

This walkthrough demonstrates the necessary steps and commands to run a network of BMv2 devices in Mininet, controlled by ONOS using P4Runtime.

In this example, the BMv2 devices will be configured with a sample P4 program that is provided by ONOS and is called , named basic.p4.

If not differently specified, the following commands have to be executed in a terminal shell of the VM.

1. Build ONOS master

   Code Block
   language bash
   $ cd ~/onos

   $ git pull origin

   masterbuck build

   master $ bazel build onos

2. Run ONOS

   Code Block
   language bash
   $ export ONOS_APPS=drivers.bmv2,proxyarp,lldpprovider,hostprovider,fwd

   buck run

   $ bazel run onos-local -- clean

   The variable ONOS_APPS indicates which ONOS applications to execute at ONOS boot. The list includes the BMv2 drivers (based on P4Runtime), the Proxy ARP application, the LLDP Link Provider, the Host Location Provider, and the Reactive Forwarding application. These applications combined together provide ONOS with capabilities to discover the topology (via injection of LLDP packets), the hosts (by intercepting and handling ARP requests) and to provide basic point-to-point connectivity.
   
   

3. On a second terminal shell, access the ONOS command line:

   Code Block
   language bash
   $ onos

   losalhost

   localhost

4. Check that all applications have been loaded successfully. On the ONOS command line, type:

   Code Block
   language bash
   onos> apps -s -a

   You should see an output similar to this (depending on your startup apps defined in $ONOSin $ONOS_APPS)

   * 10 org.onosproject.drivers 1.13.0.SNAPSHOT Default Drivers * 35 org.onosproject.generaldeviceprovider 1.13.0.SNAPSHOT General Device Provider * 36 org.onosproject.protocols.grpc 1.13.0.SNAPSHOT gRPC Protocol Subsystem * 37 org.onosproject.protocols.p4runtime 1.13.0.SNAPSHOT P4Runtime Protocol Subsystem * 38 org.onosproject.p4runtime 1.13.0.SNAPSHOT P4Runtime Provider * 39 org.onosproject.drivers.p4runtime 1.13.0.SNAPSHOT P4Runtime Drivers * 42 org.onosproject.proxyarp 1.13.0.SNAPSHOT Proxy ARP/NDP * 44 org.onosproject.hostprovider 1.13.0.SNAPSHOT Host Location Provider * 45 org.onosproject.lldpprovider 1.13.0.SNAPSHOT LLDP Link Provider * 73 org.onosproject.pipelines.basic 1.13.0.SNAPSHOT Basic Pipelines * 119 org.onosproject.drivers.bmv2 1.13.0.SNAPSHOT BMv2 Drivers * 146 org.onosproject.fwd 1.13.0.SNAPSHOT Reactive Forwarding

5. Start Mininet using the custom file bmv2.py included in onos-p4-dev. On your Mininet VM (the same where you have cloned onos-p4-dev) . On third VM terminal shell, type: 

   $ sudo

   Code Block
   language bash
   $ sudo -E mn --custom $BMV2_MN_PY --switch onosbmv2 --controller

   remote,ip=192.168.57.1,port=40123

   remote

   This will run a simple Mininet topology with 2 hosts connected to a BMv2 switch, to use a different topology please refer to the Mininet guide. The The -E argument in sudo ensures that all environment variables are exported to the root user, including $BMV2_EXE and $BMV2_JSON. $BMV2_PY is . $BMV2_MN_PY is used to point to the location of the Mininet custom file bmv2.py. All these variables are exported automatically by the onos-p4-dev shell configuration script. In our case, ONOS is running on a machine reachable from the Mininet VM at the IP address 192.168.57.1. Be sure to use the correct IP address of your ONOS instance. 40123 is the default listening port of the BMv2 controller provided in ONOS. If successful, the output of the previous command should be similar to this:

   *** Creating network *** Adding controller *** Adding hosts: h1 h2 *** Adding switches: s1 *** Adding links: (h1, s1) (h2, s1) *** Configuring hosts h1 h2 *** Starting controller c0 *** Starting 1 switches s1 Starting BMv2 target:

   /home/mininet/p4/onos-bmv2/targets/

   simple_switch

   /simple

   _

   switch

   grpc --device-id

   1

   0 -i 1@s1-eth1 -i 2@s1-eth2 --log-console -Lwarn --thrift-port

   38400

   38148 --no-p4 --

   log

   -

   console -Lwarn /home/mininet/p4/p4src/build/empty.json -- --controller-ip 192.168.57.1 --controller-port 40123

   -cpu-port 255 --grpc-server-addr 0.0.0.0:37346 [1] 2370 *** Starting CLI: mininet>

   Check that the BMv2 switch is running. On the Mininet VM shell, type:

   $ p4log 1 Calling target program-options parser Adding interface s1-eth1 as port 1 Adding interface s1-eth2 as port 2

   This command shows the log of the BMv2 instance with device ID 1 (look for --device-id in the Mininet startup output).

   Running BMv2 for the first time

   Be aware that when running BMv2 for the first time after building it, it may take a while (up to 30 seconds) before the software switch process is executed and the log file written.

   Another way to check if the switch is running is by using the native BMv2 runtime CLI. In this case, you can use the p4cli command to print some switch information:

   $ echo "switch_info" | p4cli 1
Obtaining JSON from switch...
Done
Control utility for runtime P4 table manipulation
RuntimeCmd:
device_id                : 1
thrift_port              : 38400
notifications_socket     : ipc:///tmp/bmv2-1-notifications.ipc
elogger_socket           : None
debugger_socket          : None

   Info
   title bmv2.py custom Mininet script
   When using the bmv2.py custom Mininet script, files related to the execution of the BMv2 switch are stored under /tmp. The name of these files depends on the switch name used in Mininet, e.g. s1, s2, etc. Example of these files are: bmv2-s1-grpc-port: contains the port used by the P4Runtime server executed by the BMv2 simple_switch_grpc instance named 's1' bmv2-s1-log: contains the BMv2 log bmv2-s1-netcfg.json: netcfg blob pushed to ONOS to discover the switch

   Info
   title bm-* commands
   The VM comes with a number command aliases to aid in the debugging of BMv2 when executed as part of Mininet. These commands all take one parameter, the switch name used in Mininet, e.g. s1, s2, etc. Command Description bm-log Shows a live scrolling view of the given BMv2 switch instance log bm-cli Access the BMv2 CLI, useful to dump table entries, etc. WARNING: this CLI uses the BMv2 Thrift-based APIs which capabilities overlap with P4Runtime (e.g. a table management is provided by both). For this reason, there could be inconsistency issues when using both APIs to write state to the switch. For example, if one tries to insert a table entry using Thrift, the same cannot be read using P4Runtime. In general, to avoid such issues, we suggest using this CLI only to read state, or to write state that is not managed by P4Runtime. bm-dbg Starts the BMv2 debugger bm-nmsg Start the BMv2 nanomsg event logger client

6. Check that the BMv2 switch has successfully connected to ONOS. On the ONOS command line, check the output of the following command.

   onos> devices id=device:bmv2:

   192.168.57.100:45674#1

   1, available

   =true

   =false, local-status=connected 9m33s ago, role=NONE, type=SWITCH, mfr=p4.org, hw=

   bmv2

   master, sw=

   1.0.0

   master, serial=

   n/a

   unknown, driver=bmv2

   -thrift, bmv2JsonConfigMd5=aefbfbd1543efbfbdefbfbdefbfbd121defbfbdefbfbd3468efbfbd76, bmv2ProcessInstanceId=-1811218096, protocol=bmv2-thrift

   :org.onosproject.pipelines.basic, locType=geo, name=device:bmv2:1, protocol=[p4runtime]

   From the output, we can see that our the BMv2 switch is connected (available=true), along with the MD5 sum of the JSON configuration currently deployed (bmv2JsonConfigMd5) and a unique ID of the BMv2 process instance (bmv2ProcessInstanceId). The latter is assigned automatically at switch boot and is used by ONOS to distinguish between different executions of similar BMv2 instances (i.e. with the same device ID and MD5 sum) and to detect a potential state change of a device (e.g. a reboot after a crash of the BMv2 process), in which case ONOS will promptly re-establish network state (e.g. re-install flow rules).

   The MD5 sum you see here is the one of the default.json configuration that is deployed on each BMv2 switch when they first connect to ONOS.

   You can also use the ONOS web GUI to explore your network. Point your browser to http://localhost:8181/onos/ui/login.html and authenticate yourself using username karaf and password karaf. You should be able to see something similar to this (click to zoom):

Update P4Tools to latest version

1. information on the P4 program (pipeconf) deployed (driver=bmv2:org.onosproject.pipelines.basic) and on the protocol used to control the switch (protocol=[p4runtime]).
   
   

2. Check that the 2 hosts can ping each other. On the Mininet command line, use the pingall command check the output:

   Code Block
   language text
   mininet> pingall *** Ping: testing ping reachability h1 -> h2 h2 -> h1 *** Results: 0% dropped (2/2 received)

Update P4 tools to the latest version

Since P4Runtime is a work-in-progress effort, we frequently update ONOS to support the most recent capabilities. Similarly, we update the version of the P4 tools (BMv2, P4Runtime, and p4c) in the VM. Use the following commands to update ONOS and the P4 tools to the latest version:It might be needed to update the P4Tools to the latest version. Please run these commands one at a time in the same terminal window inside you machine. This process is the same for both the pre-built VM and any machine built from scratch.

$ cd ~/onos/
$ git pull origin master
cd$ ~
onos-setup-p4-dev

Run the Developer Environment 

Start Mininet, using BMv2 simple_switch_grpc target. 

Go in the home directory:

cd ~

On your Mininet VM shell, typeThe onos-setup-p4-dev command will download and build the most recent version of the P4 tools. In case of errors, please remove any build artifact from previous executions:

sudo$ -Erm mn --custom $BMV2_MN_PY --switch onosbmv2 --controller remote,ip=192.168.56.1

...

rf ~/p4tools
$ onos-setup-p4-dev