Overview
RARE (Router for Academia, Research & Education) is an ongoing effort under the GÉANT 3rd programme which focus on determining if a routing software platform solution can fit R&E use cases. The project aims to integrate different pieces of software related to these building blocks:
- control plane: RARE uses FreeRouter under the hood used as the control plane component
- data plane: P4 is used to describe the behavioral model of RARE data plane
- and communication interface between the control plane and data plane: Interface compliant to P4Runtime specification ensure this function
A key part of the work consists in enabling a control plane software to pilot a data plane via a programmatic interface.
Resulting work
Software interface that maps the forwarding state used by a an Open source control plane (FreeRouter) to a P4-programmable data plane.
P4 is such a language proposing an interface that allows data plane programmability.
Note
P4 core language attempts to be as much as possible independent from the target or NPU processor architecture. However architecture dependance is still prominent. Code adjustments followed by a target specific compilation is necessary if you want to run your p4 program on a specific architecture.