P4 Codel Implementation

Detailed description of P4 concepts: Paper

Detailed description of Intel Tofino realization: Paper

Install

For simple tests we recommend the use of our preinstalled VM.

Preinstalled VM

A completely set up VM for P4_16 can be downloaded here:

ftp://ftp.kom.tu-darmstadt.de/VMs/p4_16-codel.ova

Username: sdn Password: vm

and a legacy VM for P4_14 (used for the creation of the Paper results):

ftp://ftp.kom.tu-darmstadt.de/VMs/P4-Codel.ova

Username: codel Password: p4

The VM is testet with Virtualbox. For Linux Users we recommend the use of a Host-only network and a ssh connection to the VM with X-forwarding.

ssh -X codel@192.168.xxx.xxx

Please go to the codel folder and follow the Run-instructions of this Readme.

cd p4-codel

If you want to reproduce the results shown in the paper this virtual machine is not powerful enough. We recommend a bare-metal server with at least 6 cores for no thread interference.

Setup

1. Install the following required tools:

   • Mininet - including make install
   • P4 compiler bm
   • P4 behavioral model

2. and in advance the following packages:

   sudo apt-get install openvswitch-testcontroller python-tk iperf3 xterm
   python -mpip install matplotlib
   pip install scapy
   

3. Clone the repository in the same parental folder than the 'behavioral-model'.

Run

• Run Mininet with the P4(bmv2) CoDel implementation

./run.sh [--nocli, --nopcap, --iperft N]

Normally this script generates PCAP files for evaluation and enters the Mininet CLI mode for debugging. With the optional command line parameters, this behavior can be changed.

• Run Mininet with a simple P4(bmv2) router (fixed-sized FIFO)

./simple_run.sh [--nocli, --nopcap, --iperft N]

• Run Mininet with the Linux kernel CoDel implementation

./linux_run.sh [--nocli, --nopcap, --iperft N]

• Run Mininet with the P4(bmv2) CoDel implementation with different RTTs

./rtt_run.sh [--nocli, --nopcap, --iperft N]

Evaluate

To evaluate the measured results run:

./evaluate.sh [--gui]

With the parameter '--gui' the generated plots will be displayed in a GUI. In the folder 'exampleOutputs' you can find results for 1000 pps and 2000 pps bottleneck speed produced on a 8 core bare-metal server.

Debug

If the Mininet CLI mode is active, you can look into the running p4-appliction with:

./start_bmv2_CLI.sh

P4_14 support in p4c

The new p4c compiler supports P4_14 and P4_16. However, there are some issues with with p4_14 code. Therefore the scripts for P4_14 code are still using the p4c-bm compiler. If you want to use the p4c compiler with p4_14 code, please use the following command in the run scripts:

p4c srcP4_14/simple_router.p4 --target bmv2 --arch v1model --p4runtime-format json --std p4-14

and modify the json file name in the run script.