|
OSDI '04 — Abstract
Pp. 347–363 of the Proceedings
FFPF: Fairly Fast Packet Filters
Herbert Bos and Willem de Bruijn, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Mihai Cristea, Trung Nguyen, and Georgios Portokalidis, Universiteit Leiden, The Netherlands
Abstract
FFPF is a network monitoring framework designed for three things:
speed (handling high link rates), scalability (ability to handle
multiple applications) and flexibility. Multiple applications that
need to access overlapping sets of packets may share their packet
buffers, thus avoiding a packet copy to each individual application
that needs it. In addition, context switching and copies across the
kernel boundary are minimised by handling most processing in the
kernel or on the network card and by memory mapping all buffers to
userspace, respectively. For these reasons, FFPF has superior
performance compared to existing approaches such as BSD packet
filters, and especially shines when multiple monitoring applications
execute simultaneously. Flexibility is achieved by allowing
expressions written in different languages to be connected to form
complex processing graphs (not unlike UNIX processes can be connected
to create complex behaviour using pipes). Moreover, FFPF explicitly
supports extensibility by allowing new functionality to be loaded at
runtime. By also implementing the popular pcap packet capture
library on FFPF, we have ensured backward compatibility with many
existing tools, while at the same time giving the applications a
signficant performance boost.
- View the full text of this paper in HTML and
PDF.
Until December 2005, you will need your USENIX membership identification in order to access the full papers. The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2004 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks within this paper.
- If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.
|
Need help? Use our Contacts page.
