Building and Testing Modular Programs for Programmable Data Planes

Abstract

Programmable data planes, PDPs, enable an unprecedented level of flexibility and have emerged as a promising alternative to existing data planes. Despite the rapid development and prototyping cycles that PDPs promote, the existing PDP ecosystem lacks appropriate abstractions and algorithms to support these rapid testing and deployment life-cycles. In this paper, we propose P4Visor, a lightweight virtualization abstraction that provides testing primitives as a first-order citizen of the PDP ecosystem. P4Visor can efficiently support multiple PDP programs through a combination of compiler optimizations and program analysis-based algorithms. P4Visor’s algorithm improves over state-of-the-art techniques by significantly reducing the resource overheads associated with embedding numerous versions of a PDP program into hardware. To demonstrate the efficiency and viability of P4Visor, we implemented and evaluated P4Visor on both a software switch and an FPGA-based hardware switch using fourteen of different PDP programs. Our results demonstrate that P4Visor introduces minimal overheads and is one order of magnitude more efficient than existing PDPs primitives for concurrently supporting multiple programs.