Contributor
yuri

High-performance P4 software switch using netmap


Mentors
Luigi Rizzo
Organization
FreeBSD

High-performance P4 software switch using netmap

Software switches are a key component of any cloud infrastructure, and even proposal focused on hardware targets, such as P4 (http://p4.org), cannot ignore software implementations and their performance.

Historically, software packet processors have been limited in performance by network I/O, but this is no more true with high speed frameworks such as netmap and DPDK.

In this project I would like to implement a modified version of the reference p4 switch on FreeBSD, which uses netmap for faster packet I/O: the goal would be reaching the 1 Mpps order-of-magnitude speed (current reference implementation is limited to 150 Kpps for a simple l2 switch with 2 hosts).

This would enable P4 to be used in fast networking experimens as well as real environments.