SONiC P4 Software Switch

#What is SONiC-P4 Software Switch

SONiC-P4 is a software switch that runs on the P4-emulated software switch ASIC developed by Barefoot. It uses the SAI.P4 to program the P4-emulated switch ASIC to emulate the data plane behavior. Other than that, it runs the real SONiC network stack. The current SONiC-P4 is released as a docker image. You can run it anywhere that docker runs -- inside a bare-metal Linux/Windows machine, inside your favorite virtual machine, or inside your favorite cloud environment. However, because of this choice, we build the various SONiC modules in a single docker image, instead of having them as their own docker image. We find this a very useful tool for developing and testing upper layer features.

#How to use SONiC-P4 Software Switch

1. You can get the newest SONiC-P4 software switch image by going to our build server, download the "docker-sonic-p4.gz"