If you want to jump straight into the action, see the Quick start guide.
libfluid is a library bundle that provides the basic features to implement an OpenFlow controller. It is composed of two separate libraries:
These pages contain the documentation and API reference to the libfluid bundle. Extra documentation is available for libfluid_msg in the form of the OpenFlow 1.0 and 1.3 specifications.
Both libraries are built in C++, and can be compiled and used independently. You can use libfluid_base with any other OpenFlow messaging library, or you can also choose to integrate libfluid_msg alone into an existing controller (or driver). Everything is licensed under the Apache license, Version 2.0.
libfluid was selected as the winner of the OpenFlow Driver Competition sponsored by ONF!
This is a very simple overview of libfluid. For more information and examples, see the Documentation page.
libfluid_base defines a client-server architecture, in which a controller is a server and a switch is a client. It provides a base class upon which you can build your controller (by inheritance): fluid_base::OFServer. You need to implement the callbacks for connection and message events, which will be called automatically.
Connections will be represented by fluid_base::OFConnection objects, which provide the abstraction for the most basic functionalities of an OpenFlow connection.
libfluid_msg (namespace fluid_msg) greatly simplifies message building and parsing in your controller. It provides classes to build OpenFlow messages with marshalling (pack) and unmarshalling (unpack) methods. Packing an object results in an OpenFlow message in the network byte order (wire format), ready to be sent through the OpenFlow connection. For unpacking, the library parses OpenFlow wire format data and sets the object attributes to the loaded values (dealing with byte ordering automatically).
Every message from libfluid_msg inherits from fluid_msg::OFMsg, which contains basic OpenFlow header information, allowing the user to create new OpenFlow messages by extending it. For example, for OpenFlow 1.0, vendor and experimenter messages can be easily implemented inheriting from fluid_msg::of10::Vendor and fluid_msg::of10::Experimenter respectively.
The image below illustrates how your implementation can use libfluid.
For a quick overview on how to install both libraries and start using them, see the Quick start guide.
For a more detailed overview of libfluid_base, see A quick intro to libfluid_base.
For a more detailed overview of libfluid_msg, see A quick intro to libfluid_msg.
The Documentation page will help you with more documentation, sample code for building a controller, porting to other architectures, binding for other languages (Python and Java) and some extra information.
If you are building an application that uses or extends libfluid, check the API reference.
The FAQ contains some trivia, explanations and known limitations.
If you're interested in contributing or diving into libfluid, checkout our repositories in GitHub:
The last repository, libfluid, is the bundle that aggregates libfluid_base and libfluid_msg, providing extra documentation, examples and useful scripts for building. It is the starting point for libfluid.
The repository guidelines describe our development and versioning practices.
A mailing list is available for any questions and discussions involving libfluid. Issues and bugs should be reported directly in the GitHub repositories mentioned above.
The OpenFlow Driver (libfluid) was originally developed by the following team at CPqD:
