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Meeting Minutes for SWAI, 15 October 2009

Present

Bob L, David E, Guido, Yiannis, Tatsuya, Dan T, Glen

OpenFlow 1.0 Spec Work

We reviewed the 1.0 spec feature page.

Flush flow table on port down

This is a feature proposed by Nicira (off list). Yiannis pointed out that the spec provides for deleting based on the output port in the action list. Dan asked if the possible unreliability of that message might be important in this, but it was deemed that a mechanism existed to do the requested functionality. This effectively tabled the discussion further.

Slicing

• Spec has been updated
• HP is okay with the proposal, though will be working through a vendor extension as they will not implement the enqueue action
• Some progress on implementation. See slicing wiki page for timeline.

Alternative enqueue methods

We spent a lot of time discussing how switches that support queues, but will not support the enqueue action should be handled. These switches use the priority or TOS bits (or potentially other mechanisms). The idea is that this should still be exposed to the controller (or FlowVisor) to allow the implementation of slicing.

• On the one hand, this is mainly for the HP implementation and we expect that might change in the future.
• On the other hand, that platform is likely to be widely deployed in the campus trials.

Yiannis indicated that the queue response could indicate the mechanism by which flows are sent to queues: Enqueue action, priority bits, TOS bits. This, then, could be used by the controller/visor to determine the proper flow actions to install to implement slicing.

There remains some question about how to specify this (in the spec or by some extension).

Extension negotiation

The above prompted a brief discussion of how we should implement the negotiation of support for extensions. For now it will likely be left: "Query functionality; switch returns unrecognized operation if it doesn't support it."

Actions

No explicit actions were determined, but the slicing, 1.0 feature development and test framework remain the current topics.