2011/11/20  <[email protected]>:
>    For the legay switches/routers, the number and fields of tables are
> fixed. But what about a newly designed openflow-only switch/router? If the
> controller can't configure the tables, the programmability is very limited.

I'm not sure I understand this statement: tables are the moral
equivalent of stages in a pipeline.  You can't dynamically reconfigure
the number of pipeline stages on your x86, but yet an x86 CPU is still
fairly programmable.  OpenFlow 1.1 provides you the ability to
manipulate the _contents_ of the tables, which enables a large scale
of applications.  Was there a specific application that you were
thinking of that would require dynamic table creation?

Also, fwiw, I should be a little more precise: when I say "hardware" ,
I really mean ASICs.  FPGA-based and network processor-based hardware
is flexible enough to potentially re-program the number of tables, and
even ASIC-based hardware have lots of configuration options.

But the bottom line remains, I'm not aware of any hardware switches
that support this currently.

- Rob
.
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