Hello folks. Today I'm excited to share with you about some work I've been hacking on in Firefox's WebAssembly (AKA Wasm) engine recently.
The tl;dr summary: starting in Firefox 78 (released June 30, 2020), you will be able to write WebAssembly functions that pass 64-bit integers to JavaScript (where they will turn into BigInts) and vice versa.
Recently I've been studying the semantics of WebAssembly (wasm). If you've never heard of WebAssembly, it's a new web programming language that's planned to be a low-level analogue to JavaScript that's supported by multiple browsers. Wasm could be used as a compilation target for a variety of new frontend languages for web programming.
A while back, I wrote a blog post explaining some of the basics of writing plugins for the VPP networking toolkit.
In that previous post, I explained a few mechanisms for hooking a plugin into VPP's graph architecture so that your code can process incoming packets.
I also briefly mentioned something called DPOs (data path objects) but didn't explain what they are or how they work. Since then, I've been reading and hacking on code that involves DPOs, so I'd like to attempt to explain them in this post.
Recently, my teammate Jessica wrote an excellent intro blog post about VPP. VPP is an open source user-space networking framework that we're looking into at Igalia. I highly recommend reading Jessica's post before this post to get aquainted with general VPP ideas.
In this blog post, I wanted to follow up on that blog post and talk a bit about some of the details of plugin construction in VPP and document some of the internals that took me some time to understand.
In my previous blog post, I talked about the support libraries and the core structure of Snabb's NIC drivers. In this post, I'll talk about some of the driver improvements we made at Igalia over the last few months.
(as in my previous post, this work was joint work with Nicola Larosa)
Another day, another post about Snabb. Today, I'll start to explain some work I've been doing at Igalia for Deutsche Telekom on driver development. All the DT driver work I'll be talking about was joint work with Nicola Larosa.
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.
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.