[pox-dev] OF1.2 support

[Sam Russell]

> 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.
>
>
OVS does 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2, so supporting 1.1 and 1.2 also improves support
for OVS. MPLS is only available from 1.1 onwards, so that's also important
by extension.


> 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.
>

Sounds cool, so featurewise we're pretty sorted (I've got a couple of
changes I should push upstream to a fix a couple of bugs with the MPLS
class that hadn't been tested), and it's more about speaking the right
language to the switch in terms of the OF version?


> 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.
>

OVS supports 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2, most of the vendors want to jump from 1.0 to
1.3, and 1.3 is backwards compatible with 1.2 anyway. With that in mind, I
think jumping to 1.2 is a great idea - it meets your goals of IPv6, MPLS,
and OVS compatibility, and has the additional advantage that vendors that
jump to 1.3 should in theory be backwards compatible with 1.2 if they
implement the standard properly.


> (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...)


+1 on this - would love to have a GNS3 equivalent for OpenFlow for
testbedding this stuff
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