[pox-dev] A few general questions about POX

[Murphy McCauley]

On May 15, 2015, at 1:46 PM, David Li <dlipubkey at gmail.com> wrote:

> First the wiki pages seem to be down these days.

Hadn't noticed.  Sent an email to try to find out what's up.

> Second, does POX support OF 1.3? I am using the version packaged with
> mininet 2.2.0 VM and don't seem to see this support.

Nope, not yet, and there are no hard plans as to how/when this will happen.  If you're using it with Open vSwitch, POX does have support for a number of OVS extensions, though, and there's a fair amount of feature overlap.

> Third, does anyone know a POX sample code that supports L2 VLAN?

I don't know of one off the top of my head.

But it's also not clear exactly what "supports" means here.  To just get basic VLAN-based isolation, I think you could do it using the multiple table and register Nicira extensions pretty easily.  Start by having a config file which has lines of "<vlan-id> <dpid1>.<port-name1> <dpid2>.<port-name2> ...".  Component reads this in at startup.  Table 0 would be an input filter, which resubmits to table 1 if the VLAN tag is the expected one (or anything for unspecified/trunk ports) and drops otherwise.  Table 1 is a normal learning/forwarding table (code could come from l2_pairs or l2_multi, for example) except that instead of output actions, it loads the output port into a register and jumps to table 2.  Table 2 is the output stage, and it matches the output port and the VLAN tag to filter out attempts to output to ports not on the right VLAN, and also contains rules for flooding each VLAN.  Should be possible to mix with the spanning tree component (provided you don't mind one tree for all VLANs).

-- Murphy