Author: Alfredo Cardigliano

In the past few years we have tried to open PF_RING in an attempt to turn it into the “new pcap” API for packet processing. Recently we have added native support for speedy FPGA-based NICs and thus created a single API for efficient NIC-independent packet processing. If you are interested in hearing more about this subject, you can have a look at the slides or watch the video of our presentation, held in Barcelona at the Suricata Conference 2015. Enjoy! …

For years we have optimised PF_RING to support multi-10 Gbit/40 Gbit operations in zero-copy at line rate using ZC. Our users know that using PF_RING they can operate at line rate in RX+TX, balance packets across processes, drop/prioritise traffic etc etc. After a few years where commodity NICs (mostly Intel) combined with PF_RING  have reached basically the same performance of FPGA-based adapters, the rush towards 100 Gbit has revamped interested towards non-commodity NICs. Due to this, you can now find on the market FPGA-based network adapters from companies such as …

Today we have released PF_RING 6.0.3,  a maintenance release that includes many fixes and small changes. The release changelog is listed below. PF_RING Library New pfring_open() flag PF_RING_USERSPACE_BPF to force userspace BPF instead of in-kernel BPF with standard drivers New API pfring_get_card_settings() to read max packet length and NIC rx/tx ring size New Napatech support Support for up to 64 channels with standard drivers, pfring_set_channel_mask() has a 64bit channel mask parameter now Reworked IPv6 parsing Configure parameter –disable-numa to remove libnuma dependency ARM fixes Minor bpf memory leak fix ZC …

Over the past few months we have spent quite some time to accelerate popular open-source IDS/IPS with PF_RING ZC. The result is that you now have the option to select your favourite security product as we support all, at no cost, using PF_RING ZC in both IDS and IPS mode. From our benchmarks we have seen that the acceleration with respect to vanilla Linux AF_PACKET is good even using  standard (non ZC) PF_RING. We will provide some test results in the near future, but in the meantime we invite you …

The number of cores per CPU is growing at a rate governed by the Moore’s law. Nowadays even low-end CPUs come with at least 4/8 cores and people want to exploit all of them before buying a new machine. It is not uncommon to see people trying to squeeze on the same machine multiple applications (n2disk, nProbe, Snort, Suricata, etc.) that all need to analyze the same traffic, saving also money for network equipments for traffic mirroring (TAPs, etc.) while reducing complexity. Both PF_RING ZC and n2disk have been designed to …

Today we have released a maintenance release of PF_RING that includes many fixes and enhancements. In particular: we have moved our binary packages over DKMS that will make them independent from kernel version that caused you to update whenever a new kernel version was released. Thanks to DKMS this is no longer necessary. We have added sysdig support into PF_RING, so that your PF_RING applications can open the virtual deveice “sysdig” for reading system events without requiring the sysdig library that adds complexity in code development Changelog: PF_RING Library New …