High-Performance Match-Action Table Updates from within Programmable Software Data Planes
Manuel Simon, Henning Stubbe, Dominik Scholz, Sebastian Gallenmüller, Georg Carle · 2021
For long, P4's mantra was that table entries could only be updated by the control plane. With the ongoing Portable NIC Architecture (PNA) standardization efforts, this is changing. In fact, PNA presumably includes explicit methods for table updates from within the data planes. Now, it is onto manufacturers and developers to integrate and use this mechanism in future P4 data planes. This would enable novel and improved applications, e.g., requiring means for maintaining state.