OpenSolaris Project: PEF: Packet Event Framework

View the leaders for this project
Project Observers

Endorsing communities

Networking

Introduction

The Packet Event Framework project is a follow-on to FireEngine, which will provide a framework for fine-grain modularity of the network stack based on the execution of a series of event functions as specified by the IP classifier.

PEF will provide the following benefits:

Better observability as the framework will support dynamic changes to an event vector.
Performance improvement due to:

Smaller code footprint by executing the code needed based on packet classification only.
Iterative execution of events which leads to smaller stack depth.
Fewer parses of the packet. Packet parsing is done once at classification time.

Support for multiple vertical perimeters(squeue_t), so a packet can traverse from one squeue_t to the next. Currently FireEngine supports a single IP squeue_t requiring packet processing to use both STREAMS based queuing and FireEngine IP squeue_t queuing. As a result, a packet can be processed totally within PEF and does not require any STREAMS processing.
CMT(Chip Multi-Threading) based processors will additionally benefit from the multiple squeue_t support through pipe-lined processing of a connection. Multiple cores and/or threads of a core can process different layers of the stack. Also, packet fanout of packets such that multiple packets can be simultaneously processed.

Document

Man pages are available here for most of the main PEF functions and data structures.

Also a PEF white paper is available here.

Download

The BFU archive for SPARC and i386/AMD64 platform, the complete source codes, and the source code patch are available here.

Announcements

14 Jun 2007

PEF Phase-I Souce Code Released

Blogs

markusflierl - Crossbow beta

Mar 10, 5:00 PM

After several months of the whole team burning midnight oil and working through weekends the Crossbow beta bits have been officially released today at noon! Of course everyone is very excited about ...

markusflierl - Job openings at Sun: Looking for college grads and interns

Nov 29, 8:56 AM

My group is looking for college hires and interns Interested in working on cutting edge networking technology: Interested in defining the future of network virtualization? We are currently looking ...

yu - Shanghai Tech Day

Oct 30, 7:14 AM

Last week I went to Shanghai tech day. This is my first time to be in Shanghai, and my impression about Shanghai is that it is a very...very modern city. It contains all the modern symbols as a big ...

markusflierl - What's new in Solaris Networking

Oct 23, 12:35 AM

It's been a while since I last blogged - oh well, I guess having a 2 1/2-year old and a 10 month old in the house counts as an excuse. A lot has happened in the last few months. I've personally ...

yu - Taking photos near Tsinghua (ERI)

Jul 10, 6:39 AM

There is a sculpture show in Tsinghua science park recently, it is a show of the greatest works from top China universities. So I brought my camera to the company last week and took some photos ...