[Question] P4 standard headers file

[EmanueleGallone]

Hi,
is it possible to create a single P4 file template containing the common standard headers that P4 is actually able to parse? for example, containing:

• L2 headers
• IPv4 headers
• IPv6 headers
• TCP headers
• UDP headers
• ...

This way, whenever someone has to deal with standard protocols it's just a matter of 'copy-paste'.

[jafingerhut]

Recently someone volunteered to coordinate an effort to create such a file that would be published by the P4.org group in one of their repositories. I will try to remember to update this issue when that is published, but I suspect there will be a fair amount of discussion and editing that happens between now and when it is published, e.g. it could easily be at least a month, if not two.

[jafingerhut]

And a mere 3.5 years later, an update :-). Alan Lo worked towards this idea in 2021, but the effort kind of stalled and was mostly forgotten about. Recently I asked him if he was willing to publish his work under the Apache 2 license, and he agreed. The resulting files are in this directory of this repo now: https://github.com/jafingerhut/p4-guide/tree/master/standard-header-defns

Davide Scano is interested in enhancing this and seeing if we can convince the p4c developers to add a file like this into p4c's set of system-wide include files.