Building Cbench on Ubuntu - 14.04 LTS

Cbench (Controller Benchmark) is a handy tool for benchmarking OpenFlow controllers. It can be installed from source using the below commands on Ubuntu 14.04.

* Installing the dependencines 

$ sudo apt-get install autoconf automake libtool libsnmp-dev libpcap-dev libconfig8-dev

* Checking-out the source code of OpenFlow 
$ git clone git://gitosis.stanford.edu/openflow.git
 

* Switch to released version 1.0.0 

$ cd openflow; git checkout -b mybranch origin/release/1.0.0 

* Checking-out the source code of Oflops 

Oflops is a package that contains the OpenFlow debugging tools, Cbench and OFlops (OpenFLow Operations Per Second).

$ git clone git://gitosis.stanford.edu/oflops.git

* Build the source code

$ cd oflops ; sh ./boot.sh ; ./configure --with-openflow-src-dir=; make 

In my case,

cd oflops ; sh ./boot.sh ; ./configure --with-openflow-src-dir=/home/pradeeban/openflow; make 

$ cd oflops ; sudo make install 

This will have installed Cbench inside the folder, /home/pradeeban/openflow/oflops/cbench.

* Execute Cbench  

Change to Cbench directory 

$ cd cbench/

Sample Execution 

$ cbench -c localhost -p 6633 -m 10000 -l 10 -s 16 -M 1000 -t
cbench: controller benchmarking tool
   running in mode 'throughput'
   connecting to controller at localhost:6633 
   faking 16 switches offset 1 :: 10 tests each; 10000 ms per test
   with 1000 unique source MACs per switch
   learning destination mac addresses before the test
   starting test with 0 ms delay after features_reply
   ignoring first 1 "warmup" and last 0 "cooldown" loops
   connection delay of 0ms per 1 switch(es)
   debugging info is off
controller msgbuf_read() = 0:   closed connection ... exiting 

Note: Failing to install libconfig8-dev in the first step will produce the below error logs.

make[2]: Entering directory `/home/pradeeban/openflow/oflops'
gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I.     -g -O2 -Wall -I/home/pradeeban/openflow/include -Wshadow `pkg-config --cflags libconfig` -MT oflops.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/oflops.Tpo -c -o oflops.o oflops.c
Package libconfig was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `libconfig.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'libconfig' found
In file included from oflops.c:11:0:
usage.h:4:23: fatal error: libconfig.h: No such file or directory
 #include
                       ^