P4: a high-level language for programming protocol-independent packet processors (opens in new tab)

Agreed. P4 is synonymous for Perforce. Did the project authors not do a cursory google first?

As for "unfortunately", what don't you like about it, apart from it not being what you're used to from elsewhere? I've used Visual Sourcesafe, Perforce and git, and Perforce seems like a perfectly decent source control system.

However, I won't deny that it would be nice to be able to manage multiple revisions locally so that I can explore different approaches and easily backtrack without having to commit to the central server.

It's pretty cool. I built a lexer/parser for the p4 language in Lua, with the intention of then building a "runtime" for it out of the Snabb networking toolkit (amusingly, I also finished most of a p4 lexer/parser in Elixir before switching to Lua).

I don't think be able to build a full p4 implementation with Snabb running as a substrate (although it's been 6 months since I last worked on it, and am blanking at the moment why not), but I think it could get pretty close. But it will be a ton of work if I get around to it, plus I don't have much experience doing networking programming at this low of a level. I got a bit distracted with work and other obligations, but I hope to pick it back up soon, particularly if p4 is finally starting to get some well-deserved attention.

p4 is an awesome idea, and solves a lot of the problems OpenFlow was running into with having to constantly update the spec for new network protocols. With p4, that's just a software update, not a protocol update. It has some other neat features as well, but unfortunately it doesn't seem as though p4 has yet caught on like OpenFlow did, even though it has many of the same people behind it as OpenFlow.

Some of the cool things that people have done with p4:

https://2016p4workshop.sched.org/info

In a way, P4 is still in very early stage. As others pointed out, Barefoot Networks is proposing their Tofino chip.

To get a taste of what is P4 like, you can get started with the Behavioural Model [1], which you can imagine as some sort of emulator over x86. My understanding is that it is also being reworked in C++ [2].

Finally, there's a module coming up for OpenVSwitch.

[1] https://github.com/p4lang/p4factory

[2] https://github.com/p4lang/behavioral-model

It is cool. Checkout Barefoot Networks, as far as I know they're the only that are. https://www.barefootnetworks.com/media/white_papers/Barefoot...

To be fair, I can't think of another OS that directly supports the things Mininet wants to do. To make it work on other platforms, they'd first have to implement those from scratch there.

Does FreeBSD nowadays provide some form of network isolation like it is available with Linux network namespaces? Nothing relevant shows up in the likely places, so I don't think it does.