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.
| Tip | ||
|---|---|---|
| ||
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.
| Warning | ||
|---|---|---|
| ||
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. |