vm

P4 Virtual Machine Installation

In this document we show how to build a VM with all the necessary dependencies and software to test and develop P4 applications.

RECOMMENDED: We provide an OVA image that can be simply imported to VirtualBox.

NOT RECOMMENDED: If you don't want to use a VM and you already have ubuntu 16.04 installed natively in your laptop you can also install the software manually. For that you can have a look at bin directory. However you do it at your own risk and we will not be able to help you if something goes wrong during the installation.

VM Contents

The VM is based on a Ubuntu 16.04.05 and after building it contains:

• The suite of P4 Tools (p4lang, p4utils, etc)
• Text editors with p4 highlighting (sublime, atom, emacs, vim)
• Wireshark
• Mininet network emulator

Build the VM using Vagrant

Requirements

In order to build the VM you need to install the following software:

• Vagrant
• VirtualBox

Add Vagrant guest additions plugin for better guest/host support.

vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest

Settings

The VM is configured to have 4 GB of RAM, 3 CPUS, and 64 GB of dynamic hard disk. To modify that you can edit the Vagrantfile before building. If needed (hopefully not), you can add more disk space to you virtual machine by following the steps shown in this Tutorial.

Building

vagrant up

Note: the first time you do vagrant up the vm will be built which can take ~1h even with a good internet connection. Once the VM is built you should reboot it to get the graphical interface.

Useful Vagrant Commands

• vagrant status -- outputs status of the vagrant machine
• vagrant resume -- resume a suspended machine (vagrant up works just fine for this as well)
• vagrant provision -- forces reprovisioning of the vagrant machine
• vagrant reload -- restarts vagrant machine, loads new Vagrantfile configuration
• vagrant reload --provision -- restart the virtual machine and force provisioning
• vagrant halt -- stops the vagrant machine
• vagrant suspend -- suspends a virtual machine (remembers state)
• vagrant destroy -- stops and deletes all traces of the vagrant machine

SSHing into the VM

If you built the VM with vagrant you can ssh into it by running:

vagrant ssh

By default vagrant ssh will login as vagrant user, however you need to switch ** the user p4** in order to be able to use the software.

You can achieve this in multiple ways:

• Modify the ssh settings of vagrant. See ssh_settings.

• Use the following command to login with the user p4:

ssh p4@localhost -p 2223 #default port we use to forward SSH from host to guest
password: p4

• Use vagrant ssh to login with the user vagrant, then switch to user p4:

vagrant@p4:~$ su p4

VM Credentials

The VM comes with two users, vagrant and p4, for both the password is the same than the user name. Always use the user p4.

Download the OVA Package

Building the vagrant image can take some time. If you want to have an already built VM you can download the Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) package and import it with a x86 software virtualizer that supports the format (this has been tested with VirtualBox only).

Pre-built OVA package: ova

Note: During the course we might need to update the OVA package.

Manual Installation

In case you want to use an already existing VM or you just want to manually install all the dependencies and required software to run virtual networks with p4 switches, you can have a look at the install scripts used by the Vagrant setup.

If you are using Ubuntu 16.04.5, you can simply copy all the scripts in /bin to your machine/VM and run then run the root-bootstrap.sh script. However, before doing that you will have to copy all the files in ./vm_files to your home directory, and edit all the lines in the scripts that try to use them. Finally, run the boostrap script:

sudo root-bootstrap.sh

FAQ

How to change the keyboard layout?

run this command in the terminal:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

Vagrant Up hangs

When you do the first vagrant up the ubuntu VM first runs apt-get update which for some reason does not work with some old vagrant boxes if you happen to ran into that problem try to update your boxes with vagrant box update.