P4 Assignment

This assignment will help you get familiar with some of the main concepts and constructs of the P4 programming language.

Obtaining required software

To complete the exercises, you will need to either build a virtual machine using 'vagrant' or use the GCP VM.

To build the virtual machine using 'vagrant':

• Install VirtualBox

  Apple Silicon Users: Follow this guide

• Install Vagrant
• Clone the repository
• Before proceeding, ensure that your system has at least 12 Gbytes of free disk space, otherwise, the installation can fail in unpredictable ways.
• cd vm-ubuntu-20.04
• vagrant up - The time for this step to complete depends upon your computer and Internet access speeds, but for example with a 2015 MacBook Pro and 50 Mbps download speed, it took a little less than 20 minutes. It requires a reliable Internet connection throughout the entire process.
• When the machine reboots, you should have a graphical desktop machine with the required software pre-installed. There are two user accounts on the VM, vagrant (password vagrant) and p4 (password p4). The account p4 is the one you are expected to use.
• Clone this repository in $HOME.

Note: Before running the vagrant up command, make sure you have enabled virtualization in your environment; otherwise you may get a "VT-x is disabled in the BIOS for both all CPU modes" error. Check this for enabling it in VirtualBox and/or BIOS for different system configurations.

You will need the script to execute to completion before you can see the p4 login on your virtual machine's GUI. In some cases, the vagrant up command brings up only the default vagrant login with the password vagrant. Dependencies may or may not have been installed for you to proceed with running P4 programs. Please refer to the existing issues to help fix your problem or create a new one if your specific problem isn't addressed there.

To use the GCP image:

• You can get the students' credit through email. (You need to email me your Gmail account (e.g. sougol@gmail.com) with the title "[SDNCourse]-GCP".)
• There is an intro to GCP in the Canvas that walks you through building a VM with a prebuilt image. (Modules -> Tools)

P4 Documentation and Extra Resources

The documentation for P4_16 and P4Runtime is available here

All exercises in this repository use the v1model architecture, the documentation for which is available at:

1. The BMv2 Simple Switch target document accessible here talks mainly about the v1model architecture.
2. The include file v1model.p4 has extensive comments and can be accessed here.

There are also some slides from a P4 tutorial event and a P4 Cheat Sheet in the repository that you can feel free to refer to as you are completing the assignment.