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P4 Learning

This repository contains a compilation of useful resources for data plane programming, specially for the ones wanting to learn how to write P4-16 programs and test them in a virtual environment.

A big part of the materials come from the Advanced Topics in Communication Networks lecture taught at ETH Zurich. For more information visit our website.

What will you find here ?

You will find software installation guides, lecture slides, specific development documentation, exercises, a collection of examples and much more. Specifically:

  • Slides: deck of slides that go from the story of SDN and introduction to data plane programming to advanced (research level) applications.
  • Documentation: list of links and documents with very useful information for P4 development.
  • Examples: a collection of examples showing how to use almost all the simple switch features.
  • Demos: a collection of demos with running examples.
  • Exercises:A set of P4 exercises with a long description and solutions.
  • Environment Installation: a guide and scripts to install the required software to start developing P4 applications in your own machine

How to start?

Clone this repository into your machine

If you want to solve the exercises, run the examples or simply download the content get a local copy of this repository in your machine:

git clone https://github.com/nsg-ethz/p4-learning.git

We will periodically add new content to this repository (specially documentation and new examples), so make sure to check it regularly or git pull it from your machine.

Required Software

In order to be able to compile P4 code, run it in a software switch (bmv2) and create virtual topologies with hosts, several dependencies and open source tools need to be installed first.

Since the installation process can be a bit tedious and cumbersome we provide you with a Vagrant script that automatically builds a virtual machine with all required software already installed. You can find the VM setup instructions in the P4 Virtual Machine Installation document.

Important: Some exercises or examples will only work (due to bug fixes) if you use the same version of bmv2 and p4c that we provide. See the following installation script and use the same commits.

Installing P4-utils

To run the exercises and examples we use P4 utils. P4-utils is an extension to Mininet to support P4 devices. It was strongly inspired by the original p4app from the p4lang repository. See the P4-utils repository for more information.

If you build the VM from the vagrant script we provide or directly download the OVA package you will have p4-utils already installed, however if you already have the required software and use your own machine/VM you can manally install it:

git clone https://github.com/nsg-ethz/p4-utils.git
cd p4-utils
sudo ./install.sh

To update you just simply:

cd /home/p4/p4-tools/p4-utils
git pull

Note: at the moment p4-utils does not support the P4Runtime, thus all the exercises and examples use the thrift RuntimeAPI (either through the CLI or with p4-utils API).