P4 support via BMv2 and P4Runtime

WORK IN PROGRESS

The content of this page is still work in progress, it will be ready for the ONOS 1.11 "Loon" release.

Developers Environment

To have a working simulator to use with the p4Runtime integration in ONOS you have two options:

download a prebuilt image of the machine
build your own machine

Download Pre-Built VM

Please download the VM provided at this link and import it into VirtualBox by double clicking on the mininet-p4.ova file.

The current machine hw spec is:

8 GB of RAM
4 cores

You can downsize the requirements on both cores and RAM to a minimum of

4 GB of RAM
2 cores

The machine username and password are:

pre-built VM username and password

Username: p4-mininet

Password: p4-mininet

Build Your own VM

The following steps will help you set up a development environment with Mininet, ONOS and BMv2 with P4Runtime support.

Before starting you need to download and set up a virtual machine with Mininet. The following instructions have been tested on the official Mininet 2.2.2 VM 64 Bit (Ubuntu 14.04), which you can find here.

Recommended minimum system requirements

In order to successfully build and execute the required tools, we recommend the following minimum system configuration:

4 GB of RAM
2 cores
8 GB free hard drive space (~4GB required to build P4 tools)

Walkthrough

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

Clone ONOS repository. On your Mininet VM shell, type:

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/opennetworkinglab/onos.git

Source ONOS's bash_profile. On your Mininet VM shell, type:
```
echo "source ~/onos/tools/dev/bash_profile" > ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
```
Important: replace .bashrc with your shell configuration profile (.bash_aliases, .profile, etc.)
Build and install P4 tools. We have prepared a special command to install everything in one shot! On your Mininet VM shell, simply type:
```
onos-setup-p4-dev
```
This command will download, build and install BMv2 (with the simple_switch_grpc target), P4Runtime libraries, the P4 compiler p4c, the old BMv2 compiler p4c-bmv2, and all required dependencies (including protobuf and gRPC). This command takes approx. 20 minutes to complete with the minimum system configuration described before.
if you run out of space on you mininet machine you can go inside the p4tools folder in the home directory:
```
cd ~/p4tools
```
then go in one of the local directories, e.g. p4rutnime
```
cd p4runtime
```
and clean the make artifacts with
```
make clean
```
Build the example P4 programs. On your Mininet VM shell, type:
```
cd ~/onos/tools/test/p4src/p4-16/
make all
```
TBC

Update P4Tools to 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 pullcd ~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, type:

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

Be sure to use the correct IP address of your ONOS instance.

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