Pipeline creation guidelines

Best practices to create a pipeline are:

  • Number of tables in your pipeline must not be more than 12.

  • Check if the table type has at least one wildcard-able field or a mask-able field.

    • If yes, maps to a TCAM table in hardware.

    • If no, maps to a HASH table in hardware.

  • Determine the table type for each table in the pipeline. Once you identify the table type as HASH or TCAM, do the following:
    1. Verify how many match groups can be created for a table.

    2. Determine how many groups the matches the selected table type.

    3. Determine the number of tiles that will be consumed from the global pool to satisfy the scale of the requested table type.

  • The minimum table size for a HASH table type is 16 and two for a TCAM table.

  • The prerequisite fields defined by the OpenFlow specification have to be part of the table match field list.

    For example, you cannot create a table with match on IPV4_SRC address without adding ETH_TYPE as a match field.

  • The first table in the pipeline must have the Table-ID as zero. The last valid Table-ID is 254.

  • Ensure no references (flows with Go To instruction) to a table are being modified or deleted from a table (that is not updated), when you selectively modify the current pipeline doing any of the following:

    • Adding an additional table to the pipeline

    • Removing an existing table from the pipeline

    • Modifying the property of an existing table

    • All of the above