Programmable data planes, PDPs, enable an unprecedented level of flexibility and have emerged as a promising alternative to existing data planes. Despite the rapid development and prototyping cycles that PDPs promote, the existing PDP ecosystem lacks appropriate abstractions and algorithms to support these rapid testing and deployment life-cycles. In this paper, we propose P4Visor, a lightweight virtualization abstraction that provides testing primitives as a first-order citizen of the PDP ecosystem. P4Visor can efficiently support multiple PDP programs through a combination of compiler optimizations and program analysis-based algorithms. P4Visor’s algorithm improves over state-of-the-art techniques by significantly reducing the resource overheads associated with embedding numerous versions of a PDP program into hardware. To demonstrate the efficiency and viability of P4Visor, we implemented and evaluated P4Visor on both a software switch and an FPGA-based hardware switch using fourteen of different PDP programs. Our results demonstrate that P4Visor introduces minimal overheads and is one order of magnitude more efficient than existing PDPs primitives for concurrently supporting multiple programs.

中文翻译：

---

为可编程数据平面构建和测试模块化程序

可编程数据平面 PDP 实现了前所未有的灵活性，并已成为现有数据平面的有前途的替代方案。尽管 PDP 促进了快速的开发和原型设计周期，但现有的 PDP 生态系统缺乏适当的抽象和算法来支持这些快速测试和部署生命周期。在本文中，我们提出了 P4Visor，这是一种轻量级虚拟化抽象，它提供测试原语作为 PDP 生态系统的一阶公民。P4Visor 可以通过编译器优化和基于程序分析的算法的组合有效地支持多个 PDP 程序。P4Visor 的算法通过显着减少与将多个版本的 PDP 程序嵌入硬件相关的资源开销，改进了最先进的技术。为了证明 P4Visor 的效率和可行性，我们使用 14 个不同的 PDP 程序在软件交换机和基于 FPGA 的硬件交换机上实施和评估了 P4Visor。我们的结果表明，P4Visor 引入了最少的开销，并且在同时支持多个程序方面比现有的 PDP 原语效率高一个数量级。