Cetus: Releasing P4 Programmers from the Chore of Trial and Error Compiling

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" summary

Cetus targets uncompilable P4 programs used on programmable ASIC switches at Alibaba by automatically rewriting them into functionally identical, compilable P4 code. It analyzes production fitting failures—finding long dependency chains between actions are the main cause—and synthesizes transformed programs that shorten those chains to meet hardware resource constraints. The paper describes the Cetus design, real production cases, and an evaluation showing it reduced developer turnaround from days to minutes.

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" chapters (16)

1. 0:00Intro
2. 1:22Data plane programming ran into fitting issues
3. 3:25Investigation: how we fixed fitting issues manually
4. 3:56Observation A1: diameter is long in our production
5. 5:36Observation A2: many memory resources are wasted
6. 6:35Observation B1: chip-specific resource adds limits
7. 8:02Cetus Architecture
8. 8:52Dependency graph building
9. 9:32How we remove dependency: WAR
10. 10:44Table merging: candidate generation and prefiltering
11. 11:33Constraint-based Filter
12. 12:00Challenge: search space is too large
13. 12:53Our solution: 2-step solving
14. 13:48Deployment experience
15. 14:05A real case solved by Cetus
16. 15:13Conclusion

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