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P4V: Practical verification for programmable data planes

  • Jed Liu
  • , Robert Soulé
  • , William Hallahan
  • , Han Wang
  • , Cole Schlesinger
  • , Calin Cascaval
  • , Milad Sharif
  • , Nick McKeown
  • , Jeongkeun Lee
  • , Nate Foster
  • Yale University
  • Intel
  • Università della Svizzera italiana
  • Stanford University
  • Cornell University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

108 Scopus citations

Abstract

We present the design and implementation of p4v, a practical tool for verifying data planes described using the P4 programming language. The design of p4v is based on classic verification techniques but adds several key innovations including a novel mechanism for incorporating assumptions about the control plane and domain-specific optimizations which are needed to scale to large programs. We present case studies showing that p4v verifies important properties and finds bugs in real-world programs. We conduct experiments to quantify the scalability of p4v on a wide range of additional examples. We show that with just a few hundred lines of control-plane annotations, p4v is able to verify critical safety properties for switch.p4, a program that implements the functionality of on a modern data center switch, in under three minutes.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSIGCOMM 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages490-503
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450355674
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 7 2018
Event2018 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, ACM SIGCOMM 2018 - Budapest, Hungary
Duration: Aug 20 2018Aug 25 2018

Publication series

NameSIGCOMM 2018 - Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

Conference

Conference2018 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, ACM SIGCOMM 2018
Country/TerritoryHungary
CityBudapest
Period08/20/1808/25/18

Keywords

  • P4
  • Programmable data planes
  • Verification

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