Released PF_RING 9.0.0: Fully Fledged Hardware Flow Tracking

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This is to announce a new PF_RING release 9.0.0!

This release brings significant improvements for a deeper flow tracking integrations, making PF_RING even more powerful for building high-performance flow processing networking applications able to leverage on state-of-the-art hardware offloads at high speed. In fact we’ve streamlined support for the latest Napatech SmartNIC’s Flow Manager FPGA, now including periodic flow updates to ensure real-time flow visibility and minimal latency for exporting flow stats.

We also explored DOCA Flow support in NVIDIA  BlueField and ConnectX adapters, to provide flow tracking also on ASIC SuperNICs using DOCA Flow Connection Tracking (CT). The source code for a sample application using this technology is publicly available in our github repository.

As always, we welcome your feedback and contributions. Stay tuned for more updates and integration guides coming soon!

Enjoy!

Changelog

Key Features

  • Consolidated Napatech Flow Manager support (now with periodic flow updates)
  • Flow tracking on NVIDIA DOCA Flow CT (BlueField 3 and ConnectX 6/7)

PF_RING Library

  • Add PF_RING_FLOW_UPDATE_CAUSE_PERIODIC to generic flow offload messages
  • Add support for Arista 7280 timestamps
  • Add ifindex to interface list returned by pfring_findalldevs()
  • Add PF_RING_HW_TIMESTAMP_UNSYNC flag to avoid setting the hw clock using system time (e.g. when using PTP)
  • PF_RING Kernel Module
    • Set interface name under /proc for non-kernel devices
    • Add SO_GET_CLUSTER_OBJECT_INFO to read ZC queue status

ZC Library

  • New API calls to check if a queue is locked and in use (pfring_zc_ipc_queue_in_use, pfring_zc_ipc_queue_in_use_from_cluster, pfring_zc_ipc_queue_in_use_from_queue)
  • Add pfring_zc_get_num_rx_channels API (print number of device queue in zcount and zbalance_ipc)
  • Implemented GTPv0 balancing in built-in hash
  • Add PF_RING_ZC_DEVICE_HW_TIMESTAMP_UNSYNC flag to avoid setting the hw clock using system time (e.g. when using PTP)

FT Library

  • Add PFRING_FT_TABLE_FLAGS_NO_GUESS flag to disable protocol guess
  • Add PFRING_FT_IGNORE_VLAN to ignore VLAN in flow key
  • Add action to pfring_ft_packet_metadata to be used in packet callbacks
  • Fix flow slices export (duration)
  • Fix shunting

PF_RING Capture Modules and ZC Drivers

  • Napatech improvements
    • Add support for periodic flow updates with the latest Flow Manager API
    • Add support for NT_TIMESTAMP_TYPE_UNIX_NANOTIME
    • Handle PF_RING_FLOW_OFFLOAD_NOUPDATES to disable periodic updates
    • Fix flow ID (32-bit on API v2) on new Flow Manager API
  • NVIDIA (Mellanox) ConnectX improvements
    • RSS limit set to 64 queues
    • Add PF_RING_RSS env var to set number of rss queues (rather then reading system conf)
    • Fix BPF rules
  • Intel improvements
    • Add MAC/VLAN support in RSS
    • Add rss_scheme parameter to select rss hash at driver load
    • Add irdma kernel module required by ice on some kernel version
  • Update support for Silicom FPGA (Fiberblaze) adapters

Examples

  • zbalance_ipc
    • Fail on bad or unsupported BPF
    • Add -0 option to disable RSS (all traffic to queue 0)
  • pfcount
    • Add ifindex to interface list (printed with -L -v 1)
    • Fix -L header
  • zcount
    • Add -U option to set PF_RING_ZC_DEVICE_HW_TIMESTAMP_UNSYNC
  • ftflow
    • Add -f to ftflow. Update FT libs.
    • Fix uninitialized memory and minor leaks
  • ftflow_pcap
    • Add -N option to disable L7 protocol guess
  • pfflow_offload improvements for Napatech Flow Manager
    • Add -u to enable periodic updates
    • Print flow updates

Misc

  • Add ARM support for PF_RING FT
  • Add support for /etc/pf_ring/keepoffload (keep interfaces offloads enabled)
  • Fix pf_ringctl script execution on Rocky9 and new RH systems based on systemd
  • Fix compilation on RH9
  • Deprecate apcon/vss timestamps