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Snabb in 2013
Hurray!
We have made 2013 a wonderful first year for the Snabb project and our quest to help modernize x86 networking!
Can you believe it was only in February that we opened our snabb-devel mailing list? Since then we have been sinking our teeth into important industrial problems within Network Functions Virtualization and Software Defined Networking, writing great software, and forming an idyllic little community of people who want to solve networking problems with simple open source software.
Snabb is on track to make a big contribution to open source Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) with OpenStack. We are developing a Neutron driver that combines the performance boost of SR-IOV hardware with the flexibility of an extensible Virtio software switch. The NFV solution is engineered to meet the technical demands of Deutsche Telekom's flagship TeraStream project and it will be completely open source and "upstream" for the OpenStack community to use and extend.
SWITCH, the pioneering Swiss ISP, are blazing the trail of using Snabb to implement new network functions when their hardware appliances don't support what they need. In their own style they are realizing the dream of Software Defined Networking: implementing new network services by programming the devices they have instead of buying new ones.
Independent professional Snabb developers are emerging from the ranks of our open source contributors. Now we have both a body of open source software and a pool of experienced talent. This combination makes it possible for companies to start new Snabb projects very quickly, and for each new project to strengthen the community with more code, experience, and opportunities for independent developers.
Our work is being watched with keen interest by many other players in the networking industry, both large and small. We can look forward to more industrial use of Snabb Switch by service providers, network equipment vendors, independent developers, system integrators, and networking startups. We look forward to welcoming these people to the community as they pop up on the snabb-devel mailing list.
In 2013 we developed many building blocks and experimental features. These are putting more and more important problems within our reach. Here are some highlights of the software we wrote:
- Intel 82599 (10G) and 82574L/82571 (1G) ethernet controller device drivers.
- Stateless Transport Tunneling (STT) support with hardware acceleration.
- Neutron agent/driver for OpenStack.
- VFIO (IOMMU) support for secure userspace device drivers.
- Multiqueue/SR-IOV hardware switch controller for Intel NICs.
- KVM vhost_user extension for zero-copy I/O.
- KVM externalpci support for creating virtual PCI devices.
- Linux Vhost architecture I/O support.
- Portable unix socket I/O support.
- IPv6 endpoint initial code.
- Load generator for 200+ Mpps per core
- "App store" framework for mix-and-match network functions.
We created the Snabb Lab with high-end hardware for open source developers to use. Initially this was a humble pair of leased servers with 1Gbps NICs for driver development. Then we added a dual-Xeon with 200Gbps (20 x 10GbE) ethernet capacity for performance testing. Now we are setting up a new development & regression testing server with 1G/10G/40G Ethernet cards from Intel, Mellanox, Solarflare, and Chelsio. Open source developers are welcome to ssh to these machines and put them to creative use (that's what they are for!)
Snabb is the combined work of very many people. While it is not possible to acknowledge every single person, it would be a shame not to try and name at least a few. In that spirit we are all glad to be working together with:
- Software developers Alex, Antonios, Geoff, Javier, Julian, Justin, Mike, Nikolay, Pete, Pierre, Rahul, Simon, and Stefan.
- Strategy makers Alessandra, Alex, Axel, Antti, Calum, Carl, Chase, Chris, Guido, Håkan, Ian, John, Peter, Rainer, Rich, Shevek, Simon, Thomas, Tomislav, and Vish.
- Sage counsellors Ann, Bryan, David, Mårten, and Mitchell.
- Industry players Deutsche Telekom, OpenStack, QEMU, Redhat, SWITCH, Silicom, Tail-f Systems, and Virtual Open Systems.
and especially to the many whose name is not listed above! Together we have made 2013 a wonderful first year for Snabb.
Now let's keep going and growing and make 2014 even better :-)
Sincerely, Luke Gorrie.
P.S. New Year's Resolution idea: subscribe to snabb-devel by sending an empty email to [email protected]