The promise of filtering packets in hardware is not new. Unfortunately filtering network adapters are pretty expensive, not to mention if they run at 10 Gbit. Furthermore many commercial FPGA-based NICs feature hardware packet filtering, but often require card reconfiguration whenever flow rules are added/removed and have a limited set of rules that can be […]
PF_RING/TNAPI-based 10 Gbit Network Monitoring on Multicore Systems
Over the past couple of years, PF_RING has been enhanced to exploit innovations in computer hardware. In particular the availability of multicore systems and efficient controllers such as those introduced by Intel with the i7 family (in particular Nehelem and Sandy Bridge) has allowed applications to spread their load across all available processors (24 cores […]
Modern Packet Capture and Analysis: Multi-Core, Multi-Gigabit, and Beyond
Sometimes people ask me a tutorial about PF_RING. Last year I have given a tutorial about it at the IM 2009 conference. I think that everyone interested in using PF_RING for going beyond packet capture acceleration should read this set of slides I used for the tutorial. Today the cost of packet capture is limited […]
Installation Guide For PF_RING
Below you can find an installation guide for PF_RING written by Gunjan Bansal. The original blog entry can be found at this URL. ————- Hi, This is my first guide so please bear with me for any disrespencies. These steps were tested on Intel Core 2 Duo machine with 4 GB Ram and Intel(R) PRO/1000 […]
10 Gbit PF_RING-based Hardware Packet Filtering and Balancing Previewed at the Intel Europe Conference
Intel Research Europe Conference, Bruxelles, May 4th 2010 Luca Deri and Joseph Gasparakis, senior Intel engineer, have previewed a new PF_RING-based technology they have co-developed that allows Linux users to fully exploit the hardware capabilities of the newest Intel X520 10 Gbit adapter (based on Intel 82599 controller). This technology that is close to public […]
PF_RING and Transparent Mode
PF_RING has been designed for enhancing packet capture performance. This means that the RX path must be accelerated, and in particular a way to accelerate this is by reducing the journey of the packet from the adapter to userland. This is obtained by allowing the driver to push the packet from the NIC to PF_RING […]
Introducing PF_RING DNA (Direct NIC Access)
This is to announce the availability of PF_RING DNA (Direct NIC Access) that significantly increments performance (up to 80%) when compared with Linux packet capture and PF_RING (non DNA). PF_RING is polling packets from NICs by means of Linux NAPI. This means that NAPI copies packets from the NIC to the PF_RING circular buffer, and […]
ntop.org Joins the Open Information Security Foundation
Suricata is the next generation open source IDS/IPS developed byt the Open Information Security Foundation. It is a pleasure to announce that ntop has joined the core development team as the Linux version of Suricata is based on acceleration provided by PF_RING. In the near future PF_RING will be extended so that it can also […]
Exploiting Commodity Multi-core Systems for Network Traffic Analysis
This article Improvement of libpcap for lossless packet capturing in Linux using PF_RING kernel patch positions PF_RING (3.x, so some changes are needed when using version 4) against the Linux standard PF_PACKET packet capture facility. In PF_RING v4, due to popular demand, I have decided to move some of the PF_RING accelerations into the NIC […]
Port Mirror vs Network Tap
In order to analyze network traffic, it’s necessary to feed ntop/nProbe with network packets. There are two solutions to the problem: port mirror (also called SPAN in Cisco parlance) network tap Prior to explain the differences between these two solutions, it’s important to understand how ethernet works. In 100 Mbit and above, hosts usually speak […]