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.
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.