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Re: [Coin] Fwd: The Future of P4, Revisited

Hesham ElBakoury <helbakoury@gmail.com> Thu, 18 May 2023 17:08 UTC

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From: Hesham ElBakoury <helbakoury@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 18 May 2023 10:08:14 -0700
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To: hemant@mnkcg.com
Cc: Haoyu Song <haoyu.song@futurewei.com>, ehalep@mojatatu.com, Toerless Eckert <tte@cs.fau.de>, "Bernier, Daniel" <daniel.bernier@bell.ca>, Marie-Jose Montpetit <marie@mjmontpetit.com>, coin <coin@irtf.org>, coinrg-chairs <coinrg-chairs@ietf.org>
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Subject: Re: [Coin] Fwd: The Future of P4, Revisited
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Last sigcomm has other papers. This is why I do not agree with Haoyu
characterization.

Hesham

On Thu, May 18, 2023, 10:05 AM <hemant@mnkcg.com> wrote:

> Four five years back P4 presented a paper from Stanford on events-based
> processing which of course maintains state. Just search for event-based
> processing P4.
>
> Hemant
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Haoyu Song <haoyu.song@futurewei.com>
> Sent: Thursday, May 18, 2023 12:19 PM
> To: ehalep@mojatatu.com; 'Toerless Eckert' <tte@cs.fau.de>
> Cc: hemant=40mnkcg.com@dmarc.ietf.org <hemant@mnkcg.com>; 'Bernier,
> Daniel'
> <daniel.bernier@bell.ca>; 'Hesham ElBakoury' <helbakoury@gmail.com>;
> 'Marie-Jose Montpetit' <marie@mjmontpetit.com>; 'coin' <coin@irtf.org>;
> coinrg-chairs@ietf.org
> Subject: RE: [Coin] Fwd: The Future of P4, Revisited
>
> Interesting discussion. See my comments below  [HS]
>
> Haoyu
>
> > For example, in the multicast drafts i write, we use C-pseudocode to
> > specify behavior, but we do attempt to implemnt on Tofino in P4.
> > Should we really use P4 code for the RFC specs... ? (much longer than
> > C Pseudocode). Aka: quite selfish (but IETF relevant ;-) reason to
> highlight
> > this point.
>
> [EH]: This is an area I'm very interested in. Having a standardized and
> formal
> language to describe protocols and behavior can bring a lot of
> functionality
> and benefits to the IETF.
> My initial thinking is that having such a blueprint, the IETF could
> generate
> tools to create a reference implementation that can be used for
> interoperability purposes therefore decreasing time to test and implement
> protocols and therefore RFC publications.
>
> [HS] P4 can only describe dataplane behaviors, so any control plane stuff
> is
> out of scope. For dataplane, if it's used to describe header format, it's
> not
> better than the "struct" in C. The language uses the match-action table
> abstraction with an implication of pipeline implementation which may make
> it
> cumbersome or even impossible to describe the  behavior (e.g.,  P4 has
> very
> limited support for stateful processing). In general, I don't think P4 at
> its
> current form can undertake the role for formal protocol specification.
>

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