SwitchDev in Ubuntu-Core? Yes Please!

Hello fellow Snappy and Networking enthusiasts. Welcome to my next blog post. This post is mostly to go over building SwitchDev into the Snappy Kernel using the latest kernel. It’s fairly straight forward if you have read my blog entry on how to build a custom kernel snap. I will touch on that a little here as well as go into some things I ran into during the initial build of this.

First things first, make sure you are running on Ubuntu 16.04 with the latest updates and snapcraft (sudo apt install snapcraft -y), and do the necessary updates:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

One thing I did differently that I did in my previous kernel snap post (Success in building a Kernel Snap in snapcraft 2.8.4) is instead of downloading the kernel source from Ubuntu, I got the latest and greatest kernel from Kernel.org, (4.7.0-RC5) but I also had snapcraft download it via git and build. I also didn’t create a kconfigfile like last time, but instead, used the kbuild mechanism to run make defconfig and make oldconfig for me so that it was up to date. I’ll explain how I did this.

The first thing I did was create a directory to work in called switchdev. mkdir ~/switchdev. I then copied my kernel config from my workstation, and name it 44.config. cp /boot/config-`uname -r` ~/switchdev/44.config

I then changed my directory to cd ~/switchdev and ran snapcraft init to build the initial snapcraft.yaml file. I then modified the snapcraft.yaml file so it looked like the following:

name: switchdev-kernel
version: 4.7.0-RC5
summary: SwitchDev Custom Kernel
description: Custom Kernel for Snappy including SwitchDev
type: kernel
confinement: strict
parts:
  kernel:
    plugin: kernel
    source: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git
    source-type: git
    kdefconfig: [defconfig, 44.config]
    kconfigs:
      - CONFIG_LOCALVERSION=-snappy"
      - CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO=n
      - CONFIG_SQUASHFS=m
      - CONFIG_NET_SWITCHDEV=y
    kernel-initrd-modules:
      - squashfs
      - ahci

I then ran snapcraft pull . I ran pull because I have to put my 44.config in the kernel/configs directory so that make oldconfig has something to go against, and I have all the required drivers and modules for a stock Ubuntu kernel.

By putting my 44.config and using defconfig, the kdefconfig parameter and the kconfigs parameter will be run to create an initial .config. Then the kernel plugin runs "yes" "" | make oldconfig to have an updated .config for building the kernel. So by pulling in all the files, I can then copy 44.config to the correct location:

cp 44.config parts/kernel/src/kernel/configs/

I then run snapcraft and grab something to snack on since it will take about an hour to build the kernel snap.

Once completed, I have a kernel snap named switchdev-kernel_4.7.0-RC5_amd64.snap. I then run this kernel snap through the ubuntu-device-flash application to create a Ubuntu-Core image that I can then install onto a switch. You have to use the ubuntu-device-flash from people.canonical.com/~mvo/all-snaps/ubuntu-device-flash and make it executable (chmod +x ubuntu-device-flash)so that you can run this. You also need kpartx installed (sudo apt install kpartx) on your machine since it uses that to build the image. Once you have all of this, simply run:

sudo ./ubuntu-device-flash core 16 --channel=edge --os=ubuntu-core --gadget=canonical-pc --kernel=switchdev-kernel_4.7.0-RC5_amd64.snap -o switchdev.img

After that completes, burn your image onto your switch by either running it through your ONIE installer package creation tool, or by using dd or whatever other method for getting an Operating System on your whitebox switch.

One thing I noticed once the system came up, was that none of the ports lined up with what the devices were called. Some were called eth0 to eth35, with some missing in between. Some were called renamed7-14, and one was named sw1_phys_port_namex. To fix this so that I could program the switch properly, I had to create a udev rules file. First thing I had to do was get the switchid. To do this, I ran

ip link show eth8 | grep switchid

and the value after switchid was what I needed. I then created /etc/udev/rules.d/10_custom.rules and put the following in:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ACTION=="add", ATTR{phys_switch_id}=="switchid", ATTR{phys_port_name}!="", NAME="sw1$attr{phys_port_name}"

I saved the file and then rebooted the switch and when it came up, all the front panel ports were named sw1p1-sw1p32. I could then use the ip command to manage the ports on the switch and even set static routes and move packets around.

Let me know how it goes for you and leave a comment if you need help!

Thanks!

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