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@Paul No I wasn’t able to get them to work unfortunately. I tried to set up a DPDK P4 software switch locally, both manually installing from source and from the t4p4s guys system(essentially installs the translator, and installs DPDK, and the translator take in v1model, PSA, PNA, eBpf, etc code and converts it all to an architecture that can be compiled with p4c-dpdk to .spec and then run on DPDK’s pipeline) but it wasnt fruitful. It took up too much time, about 4 days was spent converting my desired program from v1model to PSA(bmv2 doesnt offer a full PSA implementation unfortunately, no checksum and packet length) and about 10 days – 2 weeks trying to get the surrounding stuff installed locally to run it, but gave up due to it being a time sink. My hope was if i was able to get it working locally then just script it up and try to run it on fabric but it was no good in the end.
My intention was to do it inside a vm locally and then be able to export it and run it on fabric but with better CPU/NIC capacities. The main difficulty is with having to do huge page allocations, activate certain bios features, load kernel modules, and expose/bind nic interfaces from host into the guest in a particular way. in particular binding nics and interfaces was never successful for me. And then the issue is, its not guaranteed that all those configurations if made to work locally can be pushed onto a fabric slice and a different virtual environment. So who knows maybe one day. Because it definitely is worth setting it up once and having it as a generic template.
But definitely If you guys have a bmv2 software switch that can run v1model code, then I’m highly interested in using it.
quick and easy way to install/configure/run DPDK pipelines. In particular the P4 SWX pipeline. Pretty much, its a nice way to get a “hardware” target up and running. Utilize CPU and NICs even if the NICs aren’t directly programmable. And I believe it supports P4’s v1model, PSA, and PNA architectures. The problem is, its a big hassle of chasing dependencies, doing virtualization/kernel module games, and etc and takes way to much time/delicacy to get right. The t4p4s guys apparently have a universal translator/compiler that takes in a load of architectures and produces code that can be ran on DPDK, so this would allow folks to do everything in v1model on run on hardware without having to rewrite the programs for different architectures/targets. I recall hearing that you guys are going to bring in some compile to/run on FPGA based systems. But this would be a nice complement. and potentially a less resource/target constrained way assuming anyone can get a good/reproducible install of DPDK and t4p4s going since its all on CPU, vs the potential limitations/problems that might arise in non specialists trying to use FPGAs.
Food for thought.
