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Support a string "cookie" in TableEntry #267

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antoninbas opened this issue Feb 26, 2020 · 6 comments · Fixed by #271
Closed

Support a string "cookie" in TableEntry #267

antoninbas opened this issue Feb 26, 2020 · 6 comments · Fixed by #271
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@stefanheule
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P4Runtime v1.2.0

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@antoninbas
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The current "controller_metadata" has type uint64: https://github.com/p4lang/p4runtime/blob/v1.1.0/proto/p4/v1/p4runtime.proto#L160. This is probably legacy from OpenFlow, where each flow can have a 64-bit integer cookie. We would like to be able to store an arbitrary string as metadata with each table entry.
@antoninbas
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The decision at the 02/26/2020 P4 API WG was to add a new "metadata" field to the TableEntry message, with type string. The old "controller_metadata" field will not be removed to preserve backward-compatibility but will be marked as deprecated. All the use cases covered with a uint64 cookie should be covered with a string cookie. If someone has a better name in mind than just "metadata", please make a suggestion.

@antoninbas
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@konne-google should the exact Protobuf type for this type be bytes (arbitrary characters) or string (only UTF-8 characters)?

@antoninbas antoninbas added this to the P4Runtime v1.2.0 milestone Feb 26, 2020
@stefanheule
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It should be bytes, so arbitrary data can be stored there easily (including the 64bit cookie from before, if someone just needs that after we remove the now deprecated field).

@stefanheule
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The ForwardingPipelineConfig message has a 64bit cookie field, too. Do we want to deprecate that in favor of a bytes metadata field as well? Or only for TableEntries? @konne-google @antoninbas, and anyone else who has an opinion?

@stefanheule stefanheule mentioned this issue Mar 12, 2020
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@stefanheule
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Pull request #271 addresses the TableEntry case for now.

@ghost
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ghost commented Mar 12, 2020

I don't feel strongly about the ForwardingPipelineConfig either way. We don't need it, but it might be nice for consistency.

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Add metadata bytes field p4lang/p4runtime
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@antoninbas @stefanheule