[Click] Using the Click abstraction for a hardware switch/router

[Malveeka Tewari]

Hi 


I am second year graduate student working in the Systems and networking group at UCSD. 
As part of a project, I am planning to work on extend the Click model to hardware routers as well. The idea is to write a Click-shim that can allow Click configurations to be run on actual switch hardware as well. 
This is analogous to the case where an Operating System can work with both a hardware and software TLBs. 


I wanted to ask if anyone has already tried to extend the Click abstraction to build a hybrid router where some of the functionalities are done by software Click elements and some of the functionalities (for eg. header rewriting) is supported in hardware ? 
For instance if the switch vendors exposed the underlying hardware as programmable objects or provided an API that will let you abstract the hardware as objects with methods, will it be possible to extend the Click model for hardware switches as well? 
And if not what are the challenges and issues in supporting that extension? 


Any thoughts in this direction will be very helpful 


Thanks a lot! 
Malveeka