snort

Since some time, PF_RING includes a DAQ (Data AcQuisition library) module for the popular Snort IDS/IPS. With respect to Linux AF_PACKET, the use of PF_RING significantly accelerates all snort operations. We have recently created a new DAQ module that adds native PF_RING DNA support, further accelerating the vanilla PF_RING DAQ module from 20 to 50%. The support of DNA in addition to greater speed, also has the advantage of exploiting symmetric RSS, so that you can run one snort instance per RX queue and be sure that such instance will …

Years ago, Microsoft defined RSS (Receive-Side Scaling) with the goal of improving packet processing by enabling multiple cores to process packets concurrently. Today RSS is implemented in modern 1-10 Gbit network adapters as a way to distribute packets across RX queues. When incoming packets are received, network adapters (in hardware) decode the packet and hash the main packet header fields (e.g. IP address and port). The hash result is used to identify into which ingress RX queue the packet will be queued. In order to balance the traffic evenly on …