[TTP] What is Table Type Patterns?

As we know ( if you have to deal with the multiple flow tables of OF 1.1+ ), the multiple flow tables provide the scaling capability but increasing the complex of usage. For software switch either running on hypervisor or on operation system, it can use memory to map to the implementation of such table design. But for hardware switch based on ASIC to handle packet process pipline, the forwarding pipeline and the definition of flow table is specified and fixed. That will generate a big issue: How come application running on SDN controller knows how to deal with these specified limitation. Recently I noticed "TTP", stands for Table Type Patterns, to allow for an OpenFlow controller and OpenFlow switch to agree on a set of functionality to help manage the increased diversity made possible with OpenFlow versions 1.1+. I think that is very useful for the case: OF-DPA.

https://www.sdncentral.com/education/openflow-table-type-patterns-opendaylight-next-release-colin-dixon/2014/08/
This article mentions these capabilities have made OpenFlow a much more interesting tool in two major ways:

1. Better for developers. Simply put, the new features allow developers to do more interesting things: handle IPv6 traffic, provide better multipathing, and separate logical concerns into different tables. Of course, this is all limited to software switches if hardware doesn’t expose these features via OpenFlow, and it can’t do that if OpenFlow provides poor abstractions for hardware.

2. Better mapping onto hardware. The original model of OpenFlow (a single, very flexible table) was actually a poor fit for real network hardware. The new model allows for an OpenFlow table pipeline that can much more closely match the pipelines in real networking ASICs. This allows hardware to both expose more of its capabilities and expose them to controllers (and thus developers) in a way they can efficiently take advantage of.


https://github.com/OpenNetworkingFoundation/TTP_Repository/blob/master/TTP-FAQ.md
This FAQ document give us more information in details:

TTPs will be particularly helpful in simplifying the coding of advanced OpenFlow datapath control (where many flow tables or optional functions are needed). Because TTPs describe the expected controller/switch messaging unambiguously, they will also improve interoperability.

TTPs will also be helpful in testing or benchmarking contexts where participants want advance notice to ensure conformance or optimize performance. Such participants expect precise descriptions of what messages will be used during testing or benchmarking.

To legitimately claim support for a TTP, a switch must implement all non-optional functionality described by the TTP. As mentioned above, a TTP may describe some functionality that is optional.


PS: OpenDaylight has support TTP in Helium version
https://wiki.opendaylight.org/view/Table_Type_Patterns:Helium_Release_Notes

[OpenFlow] Install OpenFlow Dissector to Wireshark

It is for OpenFlow 1.1 and higher version.

Get sources (for Debian-based)

git clone git://github.com/CPqD/ofdissector

sudo apt-get install wireshark wireshark-dev

export WIRESHARK=/usr/include/wireshark

Install scons and build openflow library

cd ofdissector/src

sudo -s

apt-get install scons

scons install

#mv openflow.so /usr/lib/wireshark/libwireshark1/plugins/

#cd /usr/lib/wireshark/libwireshark1/plugins/

#chown root:root openflow.so

#chmod 644 openflow.so

Run Wireshark.

wireshark

[Linux Kernel] How to build Linux kernel on Ubuntu?

The general way to build Linux kernel:

• apt-get install libncurses-dev kernel-package bzip2 make ncurses-dev fakeroot module-init-tools patch 
• apt-get install fakeroot build-essential kernel-package libncurses5 libncurses5-dev
• To find the stable version from https://www.kernel.org/ and download it and tar the tar.bz2 file into /usr/src/
• cd /usr/src/linux-source-3.2.0/   <== it is my case
• make mrproper
• make menuconfig
• make -j 16
• sudo make modules_install install
• sudo update-grub2
• reboot

Booting Menu:

/boot/grub/grub.cfg

Booting Linux Options:

/etc/default/grub


The Ubuntu way to do so:

• make-kpkg clean
• make-kpkg --initrd --append-to-version=danny4400 kernel_image kernel-headers 
• cd ..
• dpkg -i   linux-image-（Push tab button)
• ls -l /boot/
• reboot

[Lagopus] Install Lagopus software switch on Ubuntu 12.04

 I attended NTT ( Ryu/Lagopus ) seminar in Aug. at NCTU, Taiwan and noticed that Lagopus(SDN/OpenFlow Software Switch) is amazing.

Its L2 switch performance with 10GbE X 2 (RFC2889 test ) for most of packet size are near to 10Gbps and the test platform is 

Intel xeon E5-2660 (8 cores, 16 threads), Intel X520-DA2 DDR3-1600 64GB. 

For more information please see the attachment pictures that I took from the seminar.

The following is the features:

• Best OpenFlow 1.3 compliant software-based switch
• Multi tables, Group tables support
• MPLS, PBB, QinQ, support
• ONF standard specification support
• OpenFlow Switch Specification 1.3.3
• OF-CONFIG 1.1
• Multiple data-plane configuration
• High performance software data-plane on Intel x86 bare-metal server
• Intel DPDK, Raw socket
• Bare metal switch
• Various management/configuration interfaces
• OF-CONFIG, OVSDB, CLI
• SNMP, Ethernet-OAM functionality

For installing Lagopus switch, you can refer to the following URL. It can give us a common installation guide for Lagopus switch.

https://github.com/lagopus/lagopus/blob/master/QUICKSTART.md


About my lagopus environment:sudo vi /usr/local/etc/lagopus/lagopus.conf

 interface {  
   ethernet {  
     eth0;  
     eth1;  
     eth2;  
   }  
 }  
 bridge-domains {  
   br0 {  
     port {  
       eth0;  
       eth1;  
       eth2;  
     }  
     controller {  
       127.0.0.1;  
     }  
   }  
 }  




But, I put 2 shell scripts for quickly installing and setting up the DPDK. I use DPDK-1.6.0 so that all the scripts are based on this version.

compile_dpdk.sh

 #!/bin/sh  
 export RTE_SDK=/home/myname/git/DPDK-1.6.0  
 export RTE_TARGET="x86_64-default-linuxapp-gcc"  
 make config T=${RTE_TARGET}  
 make install T=${RTE_TARGET}  

install_dpdk.sh

 #!/bin/sh  
 export RTE_SDK=/home/myname/git/DPDK-1.6.0
 export RTE_TARGET="x86_64-default-linuxapp-gcc"  
 DPDK_NIC_PCIS="0000:00:08.0 0000:00:09.0 0000:00:0a.0"  
 HUGEPAGE_NOPAGES="1024"  
 set_numa_pages()  
 {  
     for d in /sys/devices/system/node/node? ; do  
         sudo sh -c "echo ${HUGEPAGE_NOPAGES} > $d/hugepages/hugepages-2048kB/nr_hugepages"  
     done  
 }  
 set_no_numa_pages()  
 {  
     sudo sh -c "echo ${HUGEPAGE_NOPAGES} > /sys/kernel/mm/hugepages/hugepages-2048kB/nr_hugepages"  
 }  
 # install module  
 sudo modprobe uio  
 sudo insmod ${RTE_SDK}/${RTE_TARGET}/kmod/igb_uio.ko  
 sudo insmod ${RTE_SDK}/${RTE_TARGET}/kmod/rte_kni.ko  
 # unbind e1000 NICs from igb and bind igb_uio for DPDK  
 sudo ${RTE_SDK}/tools/pci_unbind.py --bind=igb_uio ${DPDK_NIC_PCIS}  
 sudo ${RTE_SDK}/tools/pci_unbind.py --status  
 # mount fugepagefs  
 echo "Set hugepagesize=${HUGEPAGE_NOPAGES} of 2MB page"  
 NCPUS=$(find /sys/devices/system/node/node? -maxdepth 0 -type d | wc -l)  
 if [ ${NCPUS} -gt 1 ] ; then  
     set_numa_pages  
 else  
     set_no_numa_pages  
 fi  
 echo "Creating /mnt/huge and mounting as hugetlbfs"  
 sudo mkdir -p /mnt/huge  
 grep -s '/mnt/huge' /proc/mounts > /dev/null  
 if [ $? -ne 0 ] ; then  
     sudo mount -t hugetlbfs nodev /mnt/huge  
 fi  
 unset RTE_SDK  
 unset RTE_TARGET  

Here is one thing needs to be notice. 
The variable DPDK_NIC_PCIS is my Linux eth1, eth2, and eth3's bus info as follows:

DPDK_NIC_PCIS="0000:00:08.0 0000:00:09.0 0000:00:0a.0"

You have to change them by running ethtool to see your eth bus info.

So, we need to use the comand "ethtool" to find out the NIC's bus-info as follows:
# ethtool -i eth4
driver: igb
version: 5.0.5-k
firmware-version: 3.11, 0x8000046e
bus-info: 0000:02:00.0
supports-statistics: yes
supports-test: yes
supports-eeprom-access: yes
supports-register-dump: yes
supports-priv-flags: no


After executing the 2 shell scripts, then we can start the lagopus switch by this:
sudo lagopus -d -- -c3 -n1 -- -p3

[Indigo] The architecture of Indigo 2.0

After checking with the source code of Indigo 2.0, OF-DPA (CDP) ,and IVS on GitHub, I just draw a simple architecture diagram to show the idea of hardware abstraction layer (HAL). I think the most important part is that Big Switches uses this HAL concept as hardware agnostic to adopt the different forwarding engine / port management implementation in different hardware or platform.

[RYU] Try the RYU Web GUI with Mininet

This post is about the displaying of RYU Web GUI. We can see what the GUI looks like. My environment is with 2 virtual machines running on Virtula-Box. I skep the installation guide with RYU and GUI because there is already some documents to tell how to do so. If interested, please check there:
http://blog.linton.tw/posts/2014/02/15/note-install-ryu-36-sdn-framework
http://blog.linton.tw/posts/2014/02/11/note-how-to-set-up-ryu-controller-with-gui-component

P.S: Maybe need to do this:
pip install --upgrade pip or pip install -U pip

First, I started with my RYU server and executed the command:

• > ryu-manager --verbose --observe-links ryu.topology.switches ryu.app.rest_topology ryu.app.ofctl_rest ryu.app.simple_switch

P.S: Currently the GUI doesn't support OF1.3.

Second, open another console to execute this command under your ryu directory. It is a middle-ware between Web and Controller.

• > ./ryu/gui/controller.py

For Mininet, I just downloaded the Mininet Virtual Machine and directed to use it. The following command can generate the 3 tiers network topology quickly.

>  sudo mn --controller=remote,ip=10.3.207.81 --topo tree,3

Back to the RYU server, open the browser with the URL: http://127.0.0.1:8000/   

[OF-DPA] Glance at the source code of OF-DPA on GitHub

I just quickly glance at the code of OF-DPA and draw a skeleton of it. Actually it is only about the integration Indigo with OF-DPA API ( blue color part ), and lock in with SDK and switch device. There is no OF-DPA/SDK source code ( red color part ). As the diagram described, the OEM/ODM Development Package has the full source code distributed under Broadcom SLA.

[Net-Tools] The collection of base networking utilities for Linux

Not only the collection of base networking utilities for Linux but also the great examples of network programming.
http://net-tools.sourceforge.net/