PCAP Fanout

Introduction

This version of pcap library is intended to support the PFQ socket, thus allowing legacy applications to exploit the acceleration of packet capture/transmission of PFQ, and at the same time to take advantage of pfq-lang computations to filter and dispatch packets across groups of sockets.

The pcap library interface is unchanged. Additional data (e.g. pfq group) is passed to the library as environment variables or specified via configuration file. Sniffing from multiple devices is also possible by specifying their names with ^ separator.

Features

• 10-Gbit Line-rate (14,8Mpps) tested with tcpdump and captop.
• Parallel sessions of legacy applications throughout pfq-lang filtering and steering.
• Per-group in-kernel BPF (JIT compiled filtersincluded).

Details

This implementation of pcap library is extended to support the PFQ socket. By default the library makes use of AF_PACKET socket family and when the device name is prefixed by the string "pfq" the acceleration takes place.
For applications that do not allow arbitrary names for devices, it is also possible to select the PFQ socket by specifying an environment variable with the name of the device prefixed by PFQ_ (e.g. PFQ_eth0=1). This allows to selectively choose which devices are supposed to use PFQ sockets and which are not. In the end, to force the PFQ socket for all devices, it suffices to set the PFQ_FORCE_ALL environment variable.

The syntax of the device name is the following:

pfq[/config_file]:[device[^device[^device..]]]

Environment variables

PFQ parameters that cannot be passed through the standard pcap APIs can be optionally specified with environment variables.

Default values are assumed, if not specified otherwise.

Variable	Default	> 1Mpps	Meaning
PFQ_CONFIG			Specify the PFQ/pcap config file
PFQ_FORCE_ALL			Force PFQ sockets for all devices
PFQ_DEF_GROUP	a free one		Specify the PFQ group for the process
PFQ_CAPLEN	pcap snapshot		Override the snaplen value for capture
PFQ_RX_SLOTS	4096	131072	Define the RX queue length of the socket
PFQ_TX_SLOTS	4096	8192	Define the TX queue length of the socket
PFQ_TX_SYNC	1	16..512	Hint used to flush the transmission queue
PFQ_TX_HW_QUEUE	empty list	e.g. 0,1,2	Set the TX HW queue passed to the driver
PFQ_TX_IDX_THREAD	empty list	e.g. 0,1,2	Set the index of the PFQ TX kernel threads (optional)
PFQ_LANG_SRC	null		Load the pfq-lang computation from source file
PFQ_LANG_LIT	null		Set the pfq-lang computation from the env. variable
PFQ_VLAN	empty list		Set the pfq vlan id filter list for the group

Notes

1. (> 1Mpps) column reports the suggested values for very high packet rates, e.g. 10G links with short packets.

2. PFQ_TX_HW_QUEUE, PFQ_TX_IDX_THREAD, and PFQ_VLAN are specified as comma separated list.

3. PFQ_LANG_SRC specifies the name of the pfq-lang source code to load, whereas PFQ_LANG_LIT directly contains the pfq-lang computation.

Configuration File

In addition to the environment variables, it is possible to specify PFQ parameters with a configuration file, on per-socket basis. This solves the problem of passing different values to multiple pcap socket in multi-threaded applications.

The path of the configuration file is specified along with the device name:

pfq/config_file:[device[^device[^device..]]]

Note that the character / is used as separator. To specify an absolute path, e.g. /etc/pfq.conf, use the //, as in:

pfq//etc/pfq.conf:eth0^eth1

The configuration file is based on a simple key-value grammar.

In addition, it is possible to directly embed a pfq-lang program by prefixing each line with > (this is known as Haskell bird style).

# PFQ configuration 

def_group  = 11
caplen = 64

rx_slots = 131072

tx_thread = 0,1
tx_queue  = 0,1

> 
>  main = do 
>           ip
>           tcp
> 

It is also possible to specify an external pfq-lang file using the keyword lang (as in the following examples):

lang = /etc/group-lang.hs

Per-device groups

Some special use cases require that a given PFQ group is associated to a certain device rather than a process. This let a process handle multiple devices at time, each under a different group of sockets.

A typical scenario is that of OpenFlow Software Switch (http://cpqd.github.io/ofsoftswitch13/), where multiple instances of the switch can work in parallel fashion, on a set of network devices, each processing a portion of the traffic (according to a configured steering algorithm).

The PFQ_GROUP_devname environment variable (and the counterpart group_devname keyword in the config file) can be used to override the default group for the process when opening a certain dev. For example:

PFQ_DEF_GROUP=42 PFQ_GROUP_eth0=11 tcpdump -n -i pfq:eth0^eth1

This session of tcpdump handles eth0 with the group 11 and eth1 with the default group 42.

Per-group keywords

Some keywords (and the corresponding env. variables) can be defined on per-group basis. This advanced semantic is specified by postfixing the keyword name with @group_number, or in case of the env. variable with an underscore followed by a number.

This allows to avoid multiple configuration files.

vlan = 56,78 
vlan@11 = 1,2,3

The example specifies that for the default group in use, the vlan id enabled are 56 and 78, whereas for the special group 11 the valid VID are 1, 2 or 3.

Postfixing a keyword not-supporting the per-group configuration generates a warning.

Multiple groups and virtual devices

The keyword group_devname allows to specify the number of group for a certain device. However there are cases in which an application wants to open the same device multiple-time, using sockets with different parameters (e.g. with a different criterion for packet steering).

To this aim, PFQ offers the concept of virtual device, that is a device name postfixed with ':' and a certain number. This is very similar to the alias device name, but it does not require the user to create network aliases at system level.

Example:

group_eth0 = 11
group_eth0:1 = 23

Examples

Single tcpdump session:

PFQ_DEF_GROUP=42 tcpdump -n -i pfq:eth0^eth1

tcpdump using pfq-pcap.conf configuration file:

tcpdump -n -i pfq/pfq-pcap.conf:eth0^eth1

or

PFQ_CONFIG=/pfq-pcap.conf tcpdump -n -i pfq:eth0^eth1

Load balancing TCP/UDP flows:

# master process sets computation and binding to devices...

PFQ_DEF_GROUP=42 PFQ_LANG_LIT="main = steer_flow" tcpdump -n -i pfq:eth0^eth1

# additional instances specify only the PFQ_DEF_GROUP...

PFQ_DEF_GROUP=42 tcpdump -n -i pfq
PFQ_DEF_GROUP=42 tcpdump -n -i pfq
PFQ_DEF_GROUP=42 tcpdump -n -i pfq
...

Authors

Nicola Bonelli nicola@pfq.io
Giacomo Volpi volpi.gia@gmail.com

HomePage

PFQ home-page is www.pfq.io.