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vm-ubuntu-20.04

README.md

Creating the VM

Start creating a brand new VM by running vagrant up in this directory (install Vagrant on your system if needed). This command creates a release VM that includes P4 software installed from pre-compiled packages and allows to update those packages with apt upgrade.

Alternatively, a development VM can be created by running vagrant up dev. Note that creating a development VM can take one to several hours, depending upon the speed of your computer and Internet connection.

Below are steps that were performed after one of the commands above was run on the host OS, before creating the VM images. Some of these steps could probably be automated with programs, and changes to the vagrant scripts that can do so are welcome. I performed these steps manually to create a VM image, simply to avoid the experimentation and time required to automate them. I typically only create new VM images once per month.

  • Log in as user p4 (password p4)

  • Click "Upgrade" in the pop-up window asking if you want to upgrade the system, if asked. This will download the latest Linux kernel version released for Ubuntu 20.04, and other updated packages.

  • Reboot the system.

  • This is optional, but if you want to save a little disk space, use sudo apt purge <list of packages> to remove older version of Linux kernel, if the upgrade installed a newer one.

  • sudo apt clean

  • Log in as user p4 (password p4)

  • Start menu -> Preferences -> LXQt settings -> Monitor settings

    • Change resolution from initial 800x600 to 1024x768. Apply the changes.
    • Close monitor settings window
    • Note: For some reason I do not know, these settings seem to be undone, even if I use the "Save" button. They are temporarily in effect if I shut down the system and log back in, but then in a few seconds it switches back to 800x600. Strange.

  • Start menu -> Preferences -> LXQt settings -> Desktop

    • In "Wallpaper mode" popup menu, choose "Center on the screen".
    • Click Apply button
    • Close "Desktop preferences" window

  • Several of the icons on the desktop have an exclamation mark on them. If you try double-clicking those icons, it pops up a window saying "This file 'Wireshark' seems to be a desktop entry. What do you want to do with it?" with buttons for "Open", "Execute", and "Cancel". Clicking "Open" causes the file to be opened using the Atom editor. Clicking "Execute" executes the associated command. If you do a mouse middle click on one of these desktop icons, a popup menu appears where the second-to-bottom choice is "Trust this executable". Selecting that causes the exclamation mark to go away, and future double-clicks of the icon execute the program without first popping up a window to choose between Open/Execute/Cancel. I did that for each of these desktop icons:

    • Terminal
    • Wireshark

  • Log off

  • Log in as user vagrant (password vagrant)

  • Change monitor settings and wallpaper mode as described above for user p4.

  • Open a terminal.

    • Run the command ./clean.sh, which removes about 6 to 7 GBytes of files created while building the projects.

  • Log off

Notes on test results for the VM

I have run the tests below on every VM image I release, before releasing it. You need not run them again, unless you are curious how to do so.

p4c testing results

Steps to run the p4c tests:

  • Log in as user vagrant (password vagrant)
  • In a new terminal, execute these commands:

If you are testing on a Release VM image, first get a copy of the p4c source code using the following command. This is unnecessary with a Development VM image, as there is already a p4c directory with the version of source code used to create that image already included in the home directory of the vagrant user account:

# git clone --recursive https://github.com/p4lang/p4c

The following steps are common for both Release and Development VM images:

# Compile p4c again from source, since the clean.sh step reduced disk
# space by deleting the p4c/build directory.
git clone https://github.com/jafingerhut/p4-guide
cd p4c
~/p4-guide/bin/build-p4c.sh

# Run the p4c tests
cd build
make -j2 check |& tee make-check-out.txt

As of 2022-04-02, the p4c compiler passes all but 64 of its included tests.

The relatively small group of tests whose names begin with 'ebpf' and 'ubpf' fail. They work fine in the continuous integration tests on the https://github.com/p4lang/p4c project, because the VM used to run those tests has additional software installed to enable it. Perhaps future versions of this VM will enable the ebpf and ubpf back ends to pass these tests, also. Contributions are welcome to the needed changes in the VM build scripts to enable this.

Send ping packets in the solution to basic exercise of p4lang/tutorials repository

With the version of the https://github.com/p4lang/tutorials repository that comes pre-installed in the p4 user account of this VM, the following tests pass.

First log in as the user p4 (password p4) and open a terminal window.

$ cd tutorials/exercises/basic
$ cp solution/basic.p4 basic.p4
$ make run

If at the end of many lines of logging output you see a prompt mininet>, you can try entering the command h1 ping h2 to ping from virtual host h1 in the exercise to h2, and it should report a successful ping every second. It will not stop on its own. You can type Control-C to stop it and return to the mininet> prompt, and you can type Control-D to exit from mininet and get back to the original shell prompt. To ensure that any processes started by the above steps are terminated, you can run this command:

$ make stop

Creating a single file image of the VM

These notes are primarily here as a reminder for people creating VM images for distribution. If you downloaded a VM image, these steps were already performed, and there is no reason you need to perform them again.

For the particular case of creating the VM named:

  • 'P4 Tutorial Development 2022-04-02'
  • created on April 2, 2022

here were the host OS details, in case it turns out that matters to the finished VM image for some reason:

  • Windows 10 Enterprise
  • VirtualBox 6.1.30 r148432
  • Vagrant 2.2.18

In the VirtualBox GUI interface:

  • Choose menu item File -> Export Appliance ...

  • Select the VM named 'P4 Tutorial Development 2022-04-02' and click Continue button

  • Format

    • I used: Open Virtualization Format 1.0
    • Other available options were:
      • Open Virtualization Format 0.9
      • Open Virtualization Format 2.0

  • Target file

    • I used: /Users/andy/Documents/P4 Tutorials Development 2022-04-02.ova

  • Mac Address Policy

    • I used: Include only NAT network adapter MAC addresses
    • Other available options were:
      • Include all network adapter MAC addresses
      • Strip all network adapter MAC addresses

  • Additionally

    • Write Manifest file: checked
    • Include ISO image files: unchecked

Clicked "Continue" button.

Virtual system settings:

  • Name: P4 Tutorial 2022-04-02
  • Product: I left this blank
  • Product-URL: I left this blank
  • Vendor: P4.org - P4 Language Consortium
  • Vendor-URL: https://p4.org
  • Version: 2022-04-02
  • Description:
Open source P4 development tools built from latest source code as of 2022-Apr-02 and packaged into an Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop Linux VM for the AMD64 architecture.
  • License
Open source code available hosted at https://github.com/p4lang is released under the Apache 2.0 license.  Libraries it depends upon, such as Protobuf, Thrift, gRPC, Ubuntu Linux, etc. are released under their own licenses.

Clicked "Export" button.