Balachandher Sambasivam
ABSTRACT
The advent of P4 as a protocol-independent and platform-independent network packet processing language has revolutionized the way networks are designed and the way networking devices are programmed. There are few programmable devices, whether ASICs or FPGA-based devices, that are designed with P4 programmability as the end goal right from the beginning. As a consequence, although these packet processing engines are programmable, writing a P4 compiler for these targets requires overcoming some technical challenges. Our team has worked on a variety of packet processing pipelines in recent years, in this article, we are presenting some of these challenges as well as the solutions we found to work around them.
Supplemental Material
- The P4 Language Consortium. 2021. P416 Language Specification v1.2.2. https://p4.org/p4-spec/docs/P4-16-v1.2.2.htmlGoogle Scholar
- The P4 Language Consortium. 2021. P4_16 reference compiler code from https://github.com/p4lang/p4cGoogle Scholar
- The P4 Language Consortium. 2021. P4Runtime Specification. https://p4.org/p4-spec/p4runtime/v1.0.0/P4Runtime-Spec.html.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Writing P4 compiler backend for packet processing engines
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