Question: Google Proto Buff for SAI-RPC available?

[raghunandan403]

Hi guys,
Im looking for SAI RPC implemented with GPB (rather than Thrift). This is more a question rather than a issue.
We have GPB based compilation and infra available in our NOS. So, looking for a GPB based implementation for SAI-RPC.

Our thought is:
Our NOS [SAI RPC Client(GPB)] <-> [SAI RPC Server (GPB) <-> SAI <-> Adapter layer] running on our NOS

[kcudnik]

Not sure, but probably nobody done that yet

[raghunandan403]

Kamil,
If we want to do this GPB and give it back to community, whats the process to do it?
Any recommendations/suggestions you give, to start this off?

[kcudnik]

I think you could first provide some high level design how you want to do it, also whether you want to implement this in SAI repo, since SAI repo defines only interface headers, so since you want to implement libsai.so which underline uses GPB, it will require code to do it, you can ether make it here or separate repo for that, i think this could be good topic for discussion in SAI community meeting.

PS. do you have GPB documentation somewhere, is it opensource project ? any links or references to it?

[raghunandan403]

Kamil,
https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf is the repo for GPB.

• GPB (.proto) file will provide a serialisation format for packets of typed, structured data for all SAI supported features to make RPC from south-bound of NOS to server (running on other OS which includes SAI).

Right now, we don't have any GPB notes/HLD for SAI. We will try to comeup with a draft in few weeks if community is OK to go-ahead with this layer on top of SAI.
At high level, the thought process is to use the same xml generated (while compiling for thrift rpc) and use that xml to generate a .proto, server and client libraries for all supported features in SAI.

We are thinking about:

• when we "make sai",
  • .proto files will be generated along with gpb server and client APIs.
  • libsai.so will be built containing the server-code, sai-adapter.
  • clinet lib.so will also be build.

[kcudnik]

Thanks, i just made a quick look, i sorry but i dont have time to do a deep dive into that lib.

Your steps sounds good and i think it could be beneficial to eveyrone to have such rpc.

I think it should be easy to generate proto files from SAI headers, considering that we have all headers validated and in consistent form. You just need a small parser for SAI headers.

[raghunandan403]

sai-grpc-writedown.docx

I have written down a document on what I plan to do to generate a .proto file.
Please review it. I have the code ready too.

Please let me know on your comments.

[kcudnik]

as entry document looks good

[raghunandan403]

Trying to push my diff to a branch "protobuf". I get the following error:

======
git push origin protobuf
ERROR: Permission to opencomputeproject/SAI.git denied to raghunandan403.
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights

========

Kamil,
Can you help here ?

[kcudnik]

you are trying to push to origin, you need to create fork for your repo, push to your repo branch and then create new PR here

[raghunandan403]

Created the same. Pull request is at:
#1980

Please review the diffs.