US 2020/0007473 A1 · MECHANISM FOR COMMUNICATING TO REMOTE CONTROL PLANE FROM FORWARDING ELEMENT

Abstract

Some embodiments of the invention provide a forwarding element that can be configured through in-band data-plane messages from a remote controller that is a physically separate machine from the forwarding element. The forwarding element of some embodiments has data plane circuits that include several configurable message-processing stages, several storage queues, and a data-plane configurator. A set of one or more message-processing stages of the data plane are configured (1) to process configuration messages received by the data plane from the remote controller and (2) to store the configuration messages in a set of one or more storage queues. The data-plane configurator receives the configuration messages stored in the set of storage queues and configures one or more of the configurable message-processing stages based on configuration data in the configuration messages.

Claims20

Dependent claims

For a forwarding element, a data plane circuit comprising:

at least one message-processing pipeline with a plurality of configurable message-processing stages to process data messages received by the forwarding element in order to forward at least a subset of the data messages to other elements in a network;
a data-plane configurator to configure at least a set of the configurable message-processing stages in response to configuration data messages that are received, from a remote controller, in-band with other received data messages;
and
at least one storage queue to store a first message that the data-plane configurator sends to the remote controller and that is re-circulated through the message-processing pipeline a plurality of times until an acknowledgment second message is received from the remote controller to acknowledge the first message.

1 more element

A hardware forwarding element comprising:

a data plane circuit comprising a plurality of configurable message-processing stages, a plurality of storage queues, and a data-plane configurator;
the plurality of message processing stages to process data messages received by the forwarding element in order to forward at least a subset of the data messages to other elements in a network;
the data-plane configurator to configure at least a set of the configurable message-processing stages in response to configuration data messages that are received, from a remote controller, in-band with other received data messages;
and
at least one storage queue to store a first message that the data-plane configurator sends to the remote controller and that is re-circulated through a set of message-processing stages a plurality of times until an acknowledgment second message is received from the remote controller to acknowledge the first message.

2 more elements

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.

Mechanism for communicating to remote control plane from forwarding element

Life of this patent

Mechanism for communicating to remote control plane from forwarding element

Life of this patent

Abstract

Claims20