Subject: [Bier] BIER(-FRR) prototype in P4

From: Michael Menth <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2020 13:27:21 +0200

Dear Working Group,

Daniel will give today a report about our feasibility study for
implementation of BIER and BIER-FRR on a programmable P4-based dataplane
(Tofine ASIC) including a performance evaluation.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/108/agenda/#2020-07-29-100000

Take-aways:

0) We demonstrated that BIER can be implemented in P4.

1) Tunnel-based BIER-FRR was easy to implement. It is documented in
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-merling-bier-frr-00

It is a tunnel-based approach while others pursue an LFA-based approach
which is not documented in a draft. We've discussed last year after the
meeting about this issue and a comparison of both approaches can be
found here:
https://atlas.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/~menth/papers/Menth20c.pdf

2) We have implemented BIER-TE and BIER-TE-FRR on the software switch
BMv2. We're confident that implementation in P4 on the Tofino ASIC is
also possible.

3) We're interested in other mechanisms / use cases from the ietf that
cannot be implemented on legacy hardware. We'd like to know how far can
we get with programmable data planes. We happy to discuss.

Regards,

Michael

-- 
Prof. Dr. habil. Michael Menth
University of Tuebingen
Faculty of Science
Department of Computer Science
Chair of Communication Networks
Sand 13, 72076 Tuebingen, Germany
phone: (+49)-7071/29-70505
fax: (+49)-7071/29-5220
mailto:[email-masked]
http://kn.inf.uni-tuebingen.de

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From: Tony Przygienda <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2020 15:47:45 +0200

Excellent preso, we would be more than happy to host more presentations
about different engineering aspproaches you explored and the trade-offs you
found

-- tony

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 1:27 PM Michael Menth <[email-masked]>
wrote:

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From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2020 16:28:30 +0200

Indeed, thanks a lot folks.

Beyond BIER, i am wondering:

Not following a lot of ther working groups, i am wondering if there have
been other P4 centric presentations given in other IETF WG. I have so far
only seen one in an IRTF RG.

I am also not quite sure what our current BCP is wrt to vendor impleemntation
experience reporting. I know we do it via anonymous questionaires that may end in
anonymous implementation reports, i have also seen over the years various
Demos, i also remember someone standing up in multicast meetings reporting
ever higher numbers of supported multicast states in a specific vendors router
platforms (;-), but i can not remember having seen something similar as e.g.:
presentation style. Would be good what we could do to get more experience
reports overall.. Not BIER specific question

If i remember correctly, this issue was also raised in iabopen (if i correctly
remember the group)

Cheers
    Toerless

-- 
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