Last year Intel announced a new family of 100 Gigabit network adapters, code-name Columbiaville. These new adapters, based on the new Intel Ethernet Controller E810, support 10/25/50/100 Gbps link speeds and provide programmable offload capabilities. Programmability 800 Series adapters implement new features to improve connectivity, storage protocols, and programmability, also thanks to the Dynamic Device […]
Commoditizing 10/25/40/100 Gbit with PF_RING ZC on Intel FM10K
As you know we’re working at 100 Gbit for a while, not just in terms of network speed, but also in terms of redesigning existing applications for being more efficient and powerful (BTW stay tuned as very soon we will introduce nProbe Cento). With the introduction of the new Intel FM10K ethernet controller family, it is now possible […]
Best practices for using Bro IDS with PF_RING ZC. Reliably.
Zero copy technologies such as PF_RING ZC allow applications to read packets in memory without any actor involved, being it the kernel or a memory copy. This is the reason why using ZC you can easily fill up a 10 Gbit line using a single thread and a single network card queue. The drawback of […]
Not All Servers Are Alike (With PF_RING ZC/DNA) – Part 3
We have already discussed on the first and second part of this post some common issues that might be encountered while doing high-performance packet processing. Most of the problems are related to multi-CPU servers (NUMA) and memory configuration. We have spent a lot of time creating the nBox web-GUI that is not just a graphical interface, but […]
Migrating from DNA/Libzero to PF_RING ZC
Since the introduction of PF_RING ZC (Zero Copy), we have received many inquiries about migrating from DNA/LibZero to ZC. Said that at the moment we do not plan to discontinue DNA/LibZero, we would like to summarise the differences and ease you the migration: In PF_RING 5.x (pre-ZC) there were two driver families: DNA-drivers and PF_RING-aware […]
Introducing PF_RING ZC (Zero Copy)
NOTE: The new PF_RING home is hereAfter almost 18 months of development, we are pleased to announce the release of PF_RING ZC (Zero Copy). Based on the lessons learnt with DNA and libzero, we have decided to redesign from scratch a new consistent zero-copy API that implements popular network patterns. The goal is to offer […]
How to Balance (Mobile) Traffic Across Applications Using PF_RING
Traffic monitoring requires packets to be received and processed in a coherent matter. Some people are lucky enough to get all interesting packet on a single interface, but this is unfortunately not a common scenario anymore: The use of network taps split one full-duplex interface into two half-duplex interfaces each receiving a direction of the […]
Accelerating Suricata with PF_RING DNA
Below you can find an excerpt of the “Suricata (and the grand slam of) Open Source IDPS” article written by our friend Peter Manev (Suricata core team) describing how to install and configure PF_RING, DNA and Suricata. The original blog entries can be found at Part One – PF_RING and Part Two – DNA. ————- […]
Who (Really) Needs Sub-microsecond Packet Timestamps?
Introduction For years network adapter manufacturer companies have educated their customers that network monitoring applications can’t live without hardware packet timestamps (i.e. the ability for the network adapter to report to the driver the time a given packet was sent or received). State of the art FPGA-based network adapters [1, 2, 3] have hardware timestamps […]
Not All Servers Are Alike (With DNA) – Part 2
Some time ago, we discussed on the first part of this post, why not all servers spot the same performance with DNA. The conclusion was that beside the CPU, you need a great memory bandwidth in order to move packets from/to the NIC. So in essence CPU+memory bandwidth are necessary for granting line-rate performance. In […]