[pox-dev] OF1.2 support

[Murphy McCauley]

On Feb 19, 2013, at 6:26 PM, Sam Russell wrote:

> 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.

OVS doesn't have complete 1.1 or 1.2 support yet; I don't think it has been a huge priority for them either (though they have certainly seemed to step it up in recent months).  I don't think MPLS is fully in OVS yet, but I think what is there is all available as an extension to 1.0.  But I'm not disagreeing that it's important, just saying it's not a priority *for me*. :)

> 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?

Unfortunately, I am temporarily sidetracked getting the software switch improvements from the debugger branch into the mainline.  Once I finish that up, I can get back to working on IPv6.  But yeah, in terms of infrastructure support in POX, I *think* the only change is that we want IPv6.  And the fact that we have NXM in openflow.nicira will hopefully be very helpful in getting OXM working (it'd be nice to have the two unified, but they use different values for everything, so maybe it'd be easiest to just copy/paste, at least for now).  So it's mostly about updating libopenflow, updating some events, and creating some new ones.  I think good handling of the events is secondary to the libopenflow work, so I suggest we just hack the events as needed for now and focus on libopenflow.

I'm not immediately sure how to best take your work from 1.1 and update it to 1.2 and incorporate the most recent changes in libopenflow_01.

> 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.

Sounds good to me.

So I quietly changed the default branch to betta a few days ago.  I haven't made the announcement, but this is indicative of the fact that it's getting to be time to start a new branch with a new set of goals (the first two big ones, in fact, were to be IPv6 and eventual support for 1.1).  I've now done this, so consider this as an announcement of the carp branch. :)

-- Murphy
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