P4 Tutorial

Introduction

Welcome to the P4 Tutorial! We've prepared a set of exercises to help you get started with P4 programming, organized into several modules:

1. Introduction and Language Basics

• Basic Forwarding
• Basic Tunneling

2. P4Runtime and the Control Plane

• P4Runtime

3. Monitoring and Debugging

• Explicit Congestion Notification
• Multi-Hop Route Inspection

4. Advanced Behavior

• Source Routing
• Calculator
• Load Balancing

Presentation

The slides are available online and in the P4_tutorial.pdf in the tutorial directory.

A P4 Cheat Sheet is also available online which contains various examples that you can refer to.

Obtaining required software

If you are starting this tutorial at the Spring 2018 P4 Developer Day, then we've already provided you with a virtual machine that has all of the required software installed.

Otherwise, to complete the exercises, you will need to either build a virtual machine or install several dependencies.

To build the virtual machine:

• Install Vagrant and VirtualBox
• cd vm
• vagrant up
• Log in with username p4 and password p4 and issue the command sudo shutdown -r now
• When the machine reboots, you should have a graphical desktop machine with the required software pre-installed.

To install dependencies by hand, please reference the vm installation scripts. They contain the dependencies, versions, and installation procedure. You can run them directly on an Ubuntu 16.04 machine:

• sudo ./root-bootstrap.sh
• sudo ./user-bootstrap.sh