P4 Tutorial

Introduction

Welcome to the P4 Tutorial! We've prepared a set of exercises to help you get started with P4 programming, organized into several modules:

1. Introduction and Language Basics

• Basic Forwarding
• Basic Tunneling

2. P4Runtime and the Control Plane

• P4Runtime

3. Monitoring and Debugging

• Explicit Congestion Notification
• Multi-Hop Route Inspection

4. Advanced Behavior

• Source Routing
• Calculator
• Load Balancing

Presentation

The slides are available online and in the P4_tutorial.pdf in the tutorial directory.

Obtaining required software

If you are starting this tutorial at the Spring 2018 P4 Developer Day, then we've already provided you with a virtual machine that has all of the required software installed.

Otherwise, to complete the exercises, you will need to either build a virtual machine or install several dependencies.

To build the virtual machine:

• Install Vagrant and VirtualBox
• cd vm
• vagrant up
• Log in with username p4 and password p4 and issue the command sudo shutdown -r now
• When the machine reboots, you should have a graphical desktop machine with the required software pre-installed.

To install dependencies by hand, please reference the vm installation scripts. They contain the dependencies, versions, and installation procedure. You can run them directly on an Ubuntu 16.04 machine:

• sudo ./root-bootstrap.sh
• sudo ./user-bootstrap.sh

Docker

To build your docker image:

• cd docker
• make your changes
• docker build -t <image-name>:<tag-name> .
• docker run --privileged -t -i --rm <image-name>:<tag-name> bash

To pull from an existing docker image:

• docker pull wangfx95/p4tutorial-rc3
• docker run --privileged -t -i --rm wangfx95/p4tutorial-brc3 bash