The OpenFlow v0.8.1 spec was released way back in May of 2008.  Since then, a number of vendors have joined the OpenFlow Consortium.  These implementations have identified a number of areas where the current OpenFlow spec is underspecified, inconsistent, or missing useful features.

Thanks to Justin, Ben and Brandon, we are nearing the release of OpenFlow 0.9, which will fix many bugs and provide a number of new features. Our hope is that OpenFlow 0.9 will contain all the features desired for the big OpenFlow 1.0 release, and only small changes will be described in 0.9.X spec releases.

Some of the most important new features include:

• Vendor extensions. This is necessary to keep 3rd party implementations of OpenFlow backwards compatible while allowing vendors to implement features they want to test.
• Better capability reporting.  Now a switch reports the features and wildcard fields it supports, for each table.
• IP subnetting support.  This enables OpenFlow switches to act as IP routers on some commodity switches.

For a more complete list of the proposed v0.9 changes, take a look at the 0.9 release notes draft on the wiki.

Tags: 0.9, release, standard

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 4:31 pm and is filed under OpenFlow Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.