Switch ASIC Programmability in Hybrid Mode

Programmable ASIC technology enables the switching data plane to rapidly support emergent technologies such as VNF offloading, custom tunneling and in-band telemetry. We propose a new approach for a "hybrid mode" of ASIC programmability, which maintains a discrete legacy hardware pipeline and control functions (e.g. routing, bridging) while providing a way to extend it. This places requirements on the switching hardware, programming language, data plane APIs and the network OS in order to achieve this goal. In this paper we present two hardware agnostic hybrid mode applications using a Mellanox programmable switch ASIC, P4-16 programming language, SAI flexible APIs and the SONIC Open Network OS and Linux TC. Also applications based on the Onyx OS and Spectrum SDK is discussed as a hardware specific example.