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title[ #005 ] RARE/FreeRouter-101 - key take-away
  • FreeRouter is using UNIX socket in order to forward packet dedicated to control plane + dataplane communication.

This essential paradigm is used to ensure communication between freeRouter and P4Emu/dpdk dataplane. It is ensured by pcapInt binary from freeRouter net-tools that will bind freeRouter socket (veth0a@locathost:22001) to a virtual network interface (veth0b@localhost:22002)  connected to CPU_PORT 1.

  • freeRouter is the control plane for P4Emu/dpdk dataplane

freeRouter is doing all the control plane route computation and write/modify/remove message entry P4 entries are created/modified/removed accordingly from P4Emu/dpdk tables. Although the name is P4Emu, it does not emulate BMv2 V1Model.p4, but rather router.p4

  • dpdk port_id allocation

dpkg port_id allocation follow pci_id port naming convention starting from id 0. p4dpdk.bin is invoked with the parameter: (number_of_dpdk_port - 1) + 1 <--- CPU_PORT

  • In this setup the combination of freeRouter/P4Emu/dpdk delivers a solution for small campus network having 10GE links (100GE links to be validated)

dpkg removed the kernel intervention calls for each packet processed. In that configuration packet processing is now off loaded to user space. Reducing kernel intervention to ~ 0%. Congratulation you have a hardware NIC assisted forwarding is system !

Note

In subsequent article we will see how this setup behaves with a DELL 640 server equipped with Mellanox with a  Mellanox ConnectX-5 EX Dual Port 100GbE QSFP28 PCIe Adapter Low Profile card. We will also see how to connect this server to a P4 switch, BF2556X-1T. So stay tuned !


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