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 Data Structures

• Source Routing
• Calculator

5. Dynamic Behavior

• Load Balancing

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