Stratum is an open source silicon-independent switch operating system for software defined networks. It is building an open, minimal production-ready distribution for white box switches. Stratum exposes a set of next-generation SDN interfaces including P4Runtime and OpenConfig, enabling interchangeability of forwarding devices and programmability of forwarding behaviors. Current support includes Barefoot Tofino and Broadcom Tomahawk devices, as well as the bmv2 software switch.
If you're completly new to the world of P4 and are looking for step-by-step instructions with batteries included, the NG-SDN tutorial is a good starting point. For material more focused on P4 as a language, have a look at the p4lang tutorials. Finally, there is the "Software-Defined Networks: A Systems Approach" book (HTML) for comprehensive coverage of SDN. Also see the chapter about Stratum in it.
P4Runtime provides a flexible mechanism for configuring the forwarding pipeline on a network switch.
gNMI is a framework for network device management that uses gRPC as the transport mechanism.
SDKLT is used to program fixed-pipeline switches using the Tomahawk chip from Broadcom.
Note: Pre-built Stratum binaries for Tofino are available for recent Barefoot SDE releases in the Releases page. Vendors, customers, and researchers with access to the Barefoot SDE can build Stratum themselves. For access to the SDE, please contact an Intel representative.
Note: Pre-built Stratum binaries for SDKLT and OpenNSA are available in the Releases page. Vendors and customers with a Broadcom SLA can build Stratum themselves using the Broadcom Switch SDK (SDK6); versions 6.5.17 and 6.5.19 are tested. If you would like to use Stratum with SDK6 and you do not have an SLA with Broadcom, contact a Broadcom representative or your switch vendor.
This repository contains source code for a reference implementation of the P4Runtime and gNMI services, that serves as the hardware abstraction layer for a network switch. It has been successfully prototyped at Google, running on production hardware on a data center network subsystem.
We provide a script to create a Docker development environment for Stratum.
To start the container, run the following in your stratum
directory:
./setup_dev_env.sh
The script will build a Docker image using Dockerfile.dev and run a bash session in it. This directory will be mounted in the Docker image and you will be able to run git, edit code, and build Stratum / run tests using Bazel.
For more information, you can see a complete list of arguments by running:
setup_dev_env.sh -h
If you are using Docker on Linux, make sure that you can use Docker as a non-root user, otherwise you will not be able to run setup_dev_env.sh:
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER