Rights statement: ©2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.
Accepted author manuscript, 443 KB, PDF document
Final published version
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
Research output: Contribution in Book/Report/Proceedings - With ISBN/ISSN › Conference contribution/Paper › peer-review
}
TY - GEN
T1 - Blueswitch
T2 - enabling provably consistent configuration of network switches
AU - Han, J. H.
AU - Mundkur, P.
AU - Rotsos, C.
AU - Antichi, G.
AU - Dave, N.
AU - Moore, A. W.
AU - Neumann, P. G.
N1 - ©2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.
PY - 2015/5/7
Y1 - 2015/5/7
N2 - Previous research on consistent updates for distributed network configurations has focused on solutions for centralized networkconfiguration controllers. However, such work does not address the complexity of modern switch datapaths. Modern commodity switches expose opaque configuration mechanisms, with minimal guarantees for datapath consistency and with unclear configuration semantics. Furthermore, would-be solutions for distributed consistent updates must take into account the configuration guarantees provided by each individual switch - plus the compositional problems of distributed control and multi-switch configurations that considerably transcend the single-switch problems. In this paper, we focus on the behavior of individual switches, and demonstrate that even simple rule updates result in inconsistent packet switching in multi-table datapaths. We demonstrate that consistent configuration updates require guarantees of strong switch-level atomicity from both hardware and software layers of switches - even in a single switch. In short, the multiple-switch problems cannot be reasonably approached until single-switch consistency can be resolved. We present a hardware design that supports a transactional configuration mechanism, and provides packet-consistent configuration: all packets traversing the datapath will encounter either the old configuration or the new one, and never an inconsistent mix of the two. Unlike previous work, our design does not require modifications to network packets. We precisely specify the hardwaresoftware protocol for switch configuration; this enables us to prove the correctness of the design, and to provide well-specified invariants that the software driver must maintain for correctness. We implement our prototype switch design using the NetFPGA-10G hardware platform, and evaluate our prototype against commercial off-the-shelf switches.
AB - Previous research on consistent updates for distributed network configurations has focused on solutions for centralized networkconfiguration controllers. However, such work does not address the complexity of modern switch datapaths. Modern commodity switches expose opaque configuration mechanisms, with minimal guarantees for datapath consistency and with unclear configuration semantics. Furthermore, would-be solutions for distributed consistent updates must take into account the configuration guarantees provided by each individual switch - plus the compositional problems of distributed control and multi-switch configurations that considerably transcend the single-switch problems. In this paper, we focus on the behavior of individual switches, and demonstrate that even simple rule updates result in inconsistent packet switching in multi-table datapaths. We demonstrate that consistent configuration updates require guarantees of strong switch-level atomicity from both hardware and software layers of switches - even in a single switch. In short, the multiple-switch problems cannot be reasonably approached until single-switch consistency can be resolved. We present a hardware design that supports a transactional configuration mechanism, and provides packet-consistent configuration: all packets traversing the datapath will encounter either the old configuration or the new one, and never an inconsistent mix of the two. Unlike previous work, our design does not require modifications to network packets. We precisely specify the hardwaresoftware protocol for switch configuration; this enables us to prove the correctness of the design, and to provide well-specified invariants that the software driver must maintain for correctness. We implement our prototype switch design using the NetFPGA-10G hardware platform, and evaluate our prototype against commercial off-the-shelf switches.
KW - device drivers
KW - field programmable gate arrays
KW - packet switching
KW - protocols
KW - Blueswitch
KW - NetFPGA-10G hardware platform
KW - commodity switches
KW - datapath consistency
KW - distributed consistent updates
KW - distributed control configuration
KW - hardware-software protocol
KW - inconsistent packet switching
KW - multiswitch configuration
KW - multitable datapaths
KW - network switches
KW - opaque configuration mechanisms
KW - packet-consistent configuration
KW - rule updates
KW - single-switch problems
KW - software driver
KW - switch hardware layer
KW - switch software layer
KW - switch-level atomicity
KW - transactional configuration mechanism
KW - unclear configuration semantics
KW - Computer architecture
KW - Control systems
KW - Hardware
KW - Pipelines
KW - Ports (Computers)
KW - Random access memory
KW - Software
KW - NetFPGA
KW - OpenFlow
KW - OpenFlow bundles
KW - atomic transactions
KW - switch configuration
U2 - 10.1109/ANCS.2015.7110117
DO - 10.1109/ANCS.2015.7110117
M3 - Conference contribution/Paper
SP - 17
EP - 27
BT - Architectures for Networking and Communications Systems (ANCS), 2015 ACM/IEEE Symposium on
PB - IEEE
ER -