East Coast P4 Developer Day, Spring 2018

A presentation by the P4 Language Consortium

Held at Cornell Tech on Friday, March 9, 2018

Virtual Machine

We have created a virtual machine that has all of the software needed to complete the developer day exercises already installed. You can either download a virtual machine image or build it from source. Note that both of these procedures can take around 45 minutes depending on the speed of your network connection.

• To download the virtual machine image
  1. Install VirtualBox
     https://virtualbox.org
  2. Download virtual machine image
     P4 Tutorial 2018-03-05.ova
  3. Import virtual machine into VirtualBox
     Open VirtualBox, select “File > Import Appliance”, and navigate to the downloaded file.
  4. Boot virtual machine
     Select “P4 Tutorial 2018-03-05”, and click “Start”.
• To build the virtual machine from source
  1. Install VirtualBox
     https://virtualbox.org
  2. Install Vagrant
     https://vagrantup.com
  3. Clone the tutorial repository
     $ git clone https://github.com/p4lang/tutorials
  4. Navigate to the vm directory
     $ cd tutorials/P4D2_2018_East/vm/
  5. Build the virtual machine
     $ vagrant up
• Final steps
  After the machine boots, you should have a graphical desktop with all required software pre-installed, logged in as username “p4” (with password “p4”). You may want to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions to optimize the graphics and clipboard interaction with your host OS. See the VirtualBox manual for more details.

Agenda

• 8:00 – 8:30am
  • Registration and Breakfast

• 8:30 – 9:00am
  • Technical Set-up for Hands-on LabIn order to complete the Developer Day exercises, we will distribute a virtual machine with all required software installed.

• 9:00 – 9:10am
  • Welcome and Introductions Speaker: Nate Foster (Cornell University)

• 9:10 – 10:45am
  • Introduction to Data Plane Programming Instructor: Stephen Ibanez (Stanford University)
  • Language Basics Instructor: Stephen Ibanez (Stanford University)Session 1 will provide a hand-on introduction to P4. Students will start by implementing a “Hello World”-style application to gain an understanding of P4 concepts. The lesson will progressively introduce core language features, such as header/metadata types, packet parsers, and controls. By the end of this session, students will be able to implement a basic IP router.

• 10:45 – 11:15am
  • Break

• 11:15 – 11:50
  • Software Tools Instructor: Praveen Kumar (Cornell University)Session 2 will cover software tools that are essential to developing P4 applications. Students will learn how to invoke the the P4 compiler, run the debugger, and start a P4 software switch. This session will also introduce the control-plane interfaces via P4 Runtime, a protocol-independent API auto-generated from the definition of a packet processing pipeline written in P4.

• 12:10 – 1:30pm
  • Lunch

• 1:30 – 3:00pm
  • Monitoring and Debugging Instructor: Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo (Princeton University)Session 3 will focus on a set of labs related to network monitoring and debugging. In this session, students will gain a deeper understanding of P4 language concepts, including custom headers and intrinsic metadata. In the first exercise, students will implement Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to set a congestion bit in a packet header when the queue depth exceeds a threshold. In the second exercise, MRI, students will implement a simplified version of In-Band Network Telemetry to track the path that packets travel through the network.

• 3:00 – 3:30pm
  • Break

• 3:30 – 3:50
  • Keynote: Toward Self-Driving Networks Speaker: Jennifer Rexford (Princeton University)

• 3:50 – 5:00pm
  • Advanced Data Structures Instructor: Sean Choi (Stanford University)Session 4 covers advanced data structures. In this session, students will implement two data-plane applications. In the first, source routing, end-hosts specify paths through the network by using a stack of labels in the packet header. The switch must “pop” each label and forward out the appropriate interface. In the second, students will implement a network calculator. Packets containing arithmetic expressions are sent to a switch. The switch will evaluate the expressions, and return the results back to the sender.

• 5:00 – 5:45
  • Panel DiscussionModerator: Nate Foster (Cornell University)Panelists:
    • Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo (Princeton University)
    • Anthony Dalleggio (JP Morgan Chase & Co.)
    • Sandesh Kumar Sodhi (Juniper Networks)

• 5:45-5:55
  • Closing Remarks
  • Speaker: Nate Foster (Cornell University)

• 6:00-7:30
  • Reception
  • Riverwalk Bar & Grille (425 Main St., Roosevelt Island)