[pox-dev] OF1.2 support

[Murphy McCauley]

On Feb 18, 2013, at 5:25 PM, Sam Russell wrote:

> I'm seeing a couple more controllers supporting OF1.2 - NOX through the CPqD fork, and now Ryu in a deployment of RouteFlow that I'm involved in. I think the cat's out of the bag, and we need to be in a position to support more than OF1.0 if we want POX to still be relevant.

I may be an exception in that support for higher versions of OpenFlow is not a particularly high priority for my work.  Really, good support for OVS is important to me (hence the recent work to flesh out the Nicira extensions in POX considerably), and MPLS is important to me.

But that's not to say I don't want to support higher versions as much as possible; it's of relatively less importance to me *personally*, but I'm still willing to help make it happen.

> I can find some time to do some dev work, and I'd like to apply it in the best possible places. What needs to be done to make it easier (or even possible?) to support OF1.1, 1.2, and soon 1.3?

As far as 1.2 goes, two of its big changes are supporting extensible matches and IPv6.  The former we should have a good head start on (since NXM is currently supported in POX).  The latter... support for IPv6 throughout POX is actually one of the things I'm currently working on off the mainline.  So as far as two big 1.2 features, I think we're in reasonable shape.

You got started with some of 1.1, but if I remember right, at least one notable feature hadn't made your cut yet (groups).  Also, your work was based on the not-quite-latest version of libopenflow and it'd be nice to bring it up to parity with the latest 0x01 libopenflow.

But one question I put forth before we try to make an honest effort here: should we skip 1.1 support and go straight to 1.2?  I'm not sure how much of a difference it makes, but it seems like there might be some logic to it, and I think it makes sense to decide/figure out early on where the effort should be put.

-- Murphy

(Only tangentially related: does anyone have any experience running the Ericsson or any other soft switch in Mininet?  This would be very valuable for actually getting stuff done...)