Guest talk delivered during July 2025 technical visits to IMDEA, Telefonica Innovación Digital, and CTTC. Abstract After a quick revisitation of the evolving history behind Software Defined Networking (SDN), this talk will focus on ongoing open-source research developments leveraging P4/Tofino programmable hardware and recent advances in support of 6G research. The talk will explore hardware-based network emulation and traffic generation from theoretical and practical perspectives, covering research and educational practices in courses/lectures that leverage experimental network environments based on programmable networking technologies (e.g., OpenFlow, P4). The talk will dive into emulation tools like the P4 Programmable Patch Panel (P7) along with the recent PIPO-TG and P4R traffic generators, altogether contributing to a rich experimental environment for education and research purposes. The resulting toolbox supports ongoing research efforts beyond 5G, covering different network characteristics, custom data plane pipelines, realistic and challenging traffic patterns (e.g., TSN, stateful TCP connections), and diverse application workloads (e.g., VR/XR, QUIC, 360 and Point-Cloud Video streaming)