BB-Gen: A packet crafter for P4 target evaluation

Abstract

With P4 gaining traction to define datapath pipelines along auto-generated control plane APIs, the protocol-independence and increased flexibility add non-trivial hazards when it comes to functional and in-depth performance evaluation. P4-dependent workload traces are needed along automated methods to populate the tables of the datapath under test accordingly. Without proper tools, manual efforts are required for tedious tasks such as creating appropriate PCAP traces, defining the distribution of field values, and inserting entries in the pipeline tables. To this end, we present BB-Gen, a packet crafter and table generator tool that given a P4 application and a corresponding user configuration results in packet and table traces to carry automated performance evaluation tasks.We demonstrate BB-Gen with P4 applications of increasing complexity (from L2 to VXLAN-based Data Center Gateway), using two different multi-architecture backend compilers (MACSAD, T4P4S) and different targets.