As you know if you've been following this blog, at Igalia we build network functions using the Snabb toolkit. When we're not directly working on customer projects, we often invest time into building new features into Snabb.

One of these recent investments has been building a basic IP flow export (IPFIX) app for Snabb. The app is now available in the v2017.08 Snabb release. The app's documentation is up on the web here.

As you may have seen from my previous blog posts (one and two), at Igalia we have been working on a layer-7 firewall app called Snabbwall.

This project is now coming to a close, as we've just completed the sixth and final milestone.

In my previous blog post, I wrote about the work I've been doing on Snabbwall, sponsored by the NLNet Foundation. The next milestone in the project was to write some user documentation (this is now done) and to do some benchmarking.

Recently, I've been helping out with the development of the Snabbwall project at Igalia. Snabbwall is a project to develop a layer 7 firewall using the Snabb framework.

The project is graciously sponsored by the NLNet Foundation.

My first task when I joined Igalia was experimenting with building networking apps with pfmatch and the Snabb framework. I mentioned Snabb in my last blog post, but in case you're just tuning in, Snabb is a framework built on LuaJIT that lets you assemble networking programs as a combination of small apps---each implementing a particular network function---in a high-level scripting environment.

Meanwhile, pfmatch is a simple DSL that's built on pflua, the subject of my last blog post. The idea of pfmatch is to use pflang filters to implement a pattern-matching facility for use in Snabb apps.

Today's post is about the compiler implementation work I've been doing at Igalia for the past month and a half or so. The networking team at Igalia maintains the pflua library for fast packet filtering in Lua. The library implements the pflang language, which is what we call the filtering language that's built into tools like tcpdump and libpcap.

Now that I work at Igalia on the networking team, I've started to write code in Lua (specfically with LuaJIT) in order to work with Snabb. Since I'm still a Lua newbie, I decided to attend this year's Lua Workshop in San Francisco to learn what's going on in the community.

The workshop was a lot of fun! Kudos to Mashape for hosting the event. The talks were easy to follow even for a Lua newbie like myself. I took notes on all of the talks, but I won't go over all the details since the talks were recorded and you can just see for yourself. Instead, I wanted to go over some of my personal highlights.