Cetus - Releasing P4 Programmers from the Chore of Trial and Error Compiling

Explore a conference talk from NSDI '22 that introduces Cetus, a system designed to automatically convert uncompilable P4 programs into compilable ones for programmable switches. Learn about Alibaba's experience in developing and implementing Cetus to address fitting issues in P4 programming. Discover how the system efficiently synthesizes compilable programs by shortening lengthy dependency chains, significantly reducing P4 development workload from days to minutes. Gain insights into real-world cases addressed by Cetus, its performance evaluation, and its impact on network function offloading in Alibaba's edge networks.

Intro
Data plane programming ran into fitting issues
Investigation: how we fixed fitting issues manually
Observation A1: diameter is long in our production
Observation A2: many memory resources are wasted
Observation B1: chip-specific resource adds limits
Cetus Architecture
Dependency graph building
How we remove dependency: WAR
Table merging: candidate generation and prefiltering
Constraint-based Filter
Challenge: search space is too large
Our solution: 2-step solving
Deployment experience
A real case solved by Cetus
Conclusion