The P4 Workshop Day and P4 Developer Day are the two biggest bi-annual events held by the P4 organization. The P4 Workshop Day brings together the developers and researchers from academia as well as industry who are working with P4 language creating innovative applications and use cases by providing them a platform to showcase their work via talks and demos. Similarly, P4 Developer Day which usually takes place the day after the workshop at the same venue provides a well-balanced blend of lectures & hands-on exercises with day-long activities. The P4 Workshop Day and Developer Day events were held in Stanford University’s Arrillaga Alumni Center, Palo Alto CA (USA) on June 5th and 6th respectively.
In this edition, two demos from INTRIG research group were accepted for P4 workshop. Both the works were demoed there and were well received by fellow researchers.
- Fabricio Rodriguez presented the demo “BB-Gen: A Packet Crafter for Performance Evaluation of P4 Data Planes” [1page slide], which is a simple CLI-based packet crafter to generate packet flows formatted as PCAP files from a P4 file as an input. The tool supports different standard protocols and creates the necessary traces for network function configuration and testing. It allows creating PCAPs for worst and best case scenarios with all unique flows or following flow distributions published elsewhere. This open-source tool is available in github (here).
- Gyanesh Patra presented the demo “MACSAD: An Exemplar Realization of Multi-Architecture P4 Pipelines” [1page slide], which is a multi-architecture compiler system for P4 programs. The demo showcased the BNG use case implemented using MACSAD software switches. The P4 program for the use case is available here. Also, the recently open-sourced MACSAD compiler can be found here.
