This week was intended to be a continuation of last week’s work in L2 forwarding to now working on L3 IP forwarding. The p4-learning exercises however, did not have an exercise specifically targeting IP forwarding (it did have pre-written example code but I had already reviewed that and was looking for exercises). Consequently, I decided it might be a better idea to work on the p4lang/tutorials IP forwarding exercise. I worked through the exercise but when it came time to test it, the VM I had set-up didn’t have the correct tools. I spent about a day trying to setup the tools using install-scripts from the same repository, but the new tools must’ve conflicted with the existing ones and I had already spent a day of troubleshooting on it. Fortunately, when I compared the given solution against my own there was only one minor error (the default table-action is NoAction rather than drop). While I wasn’t able to test my solution, the similarity to the given is promising and I’ll consider that a success.
I’ve had a few other problems crop up this week that I plan to sort out next week. My computer has been having frequent kernel panics which is impacting my work and I’ve had to do a bit of reconfiguring that may effect my work. This week has been helpful however in working with Tavis to plan our DIMACS report document. We’ve developed a tentative outline that we think will do a good job of summarizing the work we’ve done in the program thus-far leaving space to include our expected work from the coming weeks. I’m hoping to start working on the draft early next week. Once I’ve done some work drafting, Tavis and I will meet again to discuss again and delegate responsibilities. Given that we expect our presentation to be a slimmed-down version of our report, it is our hope that getting started the report now will make things easier down-the-road.