P4Benchmark

Tool to benchmark P4 Compilers and Targets

Installation

Run the following commands:

pip install -r requirements.txt
python setup.py install

Generate P4 Program and PCAP file for testing

• Benchmark parse field

The generated P4 program parses Ethernet, PTP and a customized header containing 4 fields and each field is 16-bit wide:

p4benchmark --feature parse-field --fields 4

• Benchmark parse header

The generated P4 program parses Ethernet, PTP and a customized number of headers each containing a customized number of fields. Each field is 16-bit wide:

p4benchmark --feature parse-header --fields 4 --headers 4

• Benchmark parse complex

The generated P4 program parses Ethernet, PTP and a parse graph that has the depth of 2 and each node has 2 branches:

p4benchmark --feature parse-complex --depth 2 --fanout 2

• Benchmark action complexity

The generated P4 program has N=2 number of set-field operations:

p4benchmark --feature set-field --operations 2

• Benchmark header addition

The generated P4 program adds N=2 number of headers to packets:

p4benchmark --feature add-header --headers 2

• Benchmark header removal

The generated P4 program removes N=2 number of headers to packets:

p4benchmark --feature rm-header --headers 2

• Benchmark processing pipeline

The generated P4 program applies N=2 number of tables:

p4benchmark --feature pipeline --tables 2 --table-size 32

• Benchmark Read State

The generated P4 program declares 1 register and performs 10 number of read operations:

p4benchmark --feature read-state --registers 1 --operation 10

• Benchmark Write State

The generated P4 program declares 1 register and performs 10 number of write operations:

p4benchmark --feature write-state --registers 1 --operation 10

Generated Files

The output directory contains:

$ ls output
commands.txt  main.p4  run_switch.sh  run_test.py  test.pcap

1. main.p4        The desired program to benchmark a particular feature of the P4 target
2. test.pcap      Sample packet crafted to match the parser or tables
3. run_switch.sh  Script to run and configure bmv2
4. commands.txt   Match-action rules for tables
5. run_test.py    Python packet generator and receiver

Run Behavioral Target

Require Behavioral Model 2 and P4C:

$ cd output
$ ./run_switch

Run Python packet generator

In another terminal, run:

$ cd output
$ sudo ./run_test.py --nb-headers 1 --nb-fields 4

PKTGEN (Send PCAP file)

Or, you could use a high performance packet generator that sends the prepared PCAP file and sniffs for returning packets

Build

Requrire cmake and libpcap:

cd pktgen
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

Run pktgen

This packet generator reads the prepared PCAP file and send c copies of that packet at t Byte per second out of the interface veth4. The result is stored in the result directory:

$ p4benchmark/pktgen/build
$ sudo ./p4benchmark -p ../../output/test.pcap -i veth4 -c 10000 -t 10000 -o result