POX is a networking software platform written in Python.
POX started life as an OpenFlow controller, but can now also function as an OpenFlow switch, and can be useful for writing networking software in general. It currently supports OpenFlow 1.0 and includes special support for the Open vSwitch/Nicira extensions.
POX versions are named. Starting with POX "gar", POX officially requires Python 3. The last version with support for Python 2 was POX "fangtooth". POX should run under Linux, Mac OS, and Windows. (And just about anywhere else -- we've run it on Android phones, under FreeBSD, Haiku, and elsewhere. All you need is Python!) Some features are not available on all platforms. Linux is the most featureful.
This README contains some information to get you started, but is purposely brief. For more information, please see the full documentation.
pox.py boots up POX. It takes a list of component names on the command line,
locates the components, calls their launch() function (if it exists), and
then transitions to the "up" state.
If you run ./pox.py, it will attempt to find an appropriate Python 3
interpreter itself. In particular, if there is a copy of PyPy in the main
POX directory, it will use that (for a potentially large performance boost!).
Otherwise it will look for things called python3 and fall back to python.
You can also, of course, invoke the desired Python interpreter manually
(e.g., python3 pox.py).
The POX commandline optionally starts with POX's own options (see below). This is followed by the name of a POX component, which may be followed by options for that component. This may be followed by further components and their options.
./pox.py [pox-options...] [component] [component-options...] ...
While components' options are up to the component (see the component's documentation), as mentioned above, POX has some options of its own. Some useful ones are:
| Option | Meaning |
|---|---|
--verbose |
print stack traces for initialization exceptions |
--no-openflow |
don't start the openflow module automatically |
POX components are basically Python modules with a few POX-specific
conventions. They are looked for everywhere that Python normally looks, plus
the pox and ext directories. Thus, you can do the following:
./pox.py forwarding.l2_learning
As mentioned above, you can pass options to the components by specifying
options after the component name. These are passed to the corresponding
module's launch() funcion. For example, if you want to run POX as an
OpenFlow controller and control address or port it uses, you can pass those
as options to the openflow._01 component:
./pox.py openflow.of_01 --address=10.1.1.1 --port=6634
The full POX documentation is available on GitHub at https://noxrepo.github.io/pox-doc/html/
