NetBricks is a Rust based framework for NFV development. Please refer to the paper for information about the architecture and design. Currently NetBricks requires a relatively modern Linux version.

Up and Running

NetBricks can built within a Docker container. In this case, you do not need to install any of the dependencies, and the final product can be run the same. However to run NetBricks you still need to be on a machine or VM that is correctly configured to run DPDK (version 18.11.2).

If you use our vagrant-based Developer environment, all DPDK configuration is done for you. We also include the MoonGen traffic generator and the Containernet virtual network simulator for testing and development.

Creating a Developer environment with vagrant

1. Clone our utils and moonGen repositories into the same parent directory.

   host$ for repo in utils moonGen; do \
           git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/williamofockham/${repo}.git; \
         done

2. Install Vagrant and VirtualBox.

3. Install the vagrant-disksize (required) and vagrant-vbguest (recommended) vagrant-reload (required) plugins:

   host$ vagrant plugin install vagrant-disksize vagrant-vbguest vagrant-reload

4. Symlink the Vagrantfile into the parent directory.

   host$ ln -s utils/Vagrantfile

Note: If you want, you can update the VirtualBox machine name (vb.name) or any other VM settings within the Vagrantfile once it has been symlinked.

5. Boot the VM:

   host$ vagrant up

6. SSH into the running Vagrant VM,

   host$ vagrant ssh

7. Once you're within the Vagrant instance, run the sandbox container from within Vagrant:

   vagrant$ make -f docker.mk run

8. After step 6, you'll be in the container and then can compile and test NetBricks via

   docker$ cd netbricks
   docker$ make build
   ...
   docker$ make test
   ...

For faster setup, you can run make init to handle steps 0 and 1 and 4 for you.

The above steps will prepare your virtual machine with all of the appropriate DPDK settings (multiple secondary NICs, install kernel modules, enable huge pages, bind the extra interfaces to DPDK drivers) and install Containernet if you want to set up simulations with your NFs.

If you have utils and MoonGen cloned as described in the steps above, those repositories will be shared into the VM at /vagrant/utils and /vagrant/moongen respectively.

Developing with NetBricks within a Docker container

For development of NFs with NetBricks, we use a set of Docker containers to install and bind ports use with DPDK, as well other dependencies. All of this exists in our utils sandbox, which can be cloned accordingly and is part of our Developer environment above. As mentioned in steps 6 and 7 above, you can run our sandbox container and develop and test NetBricks via

$ make -f docker.mk run

and

docker$ cd netbricks
docker$ make build
...
docker$ make test
...

And you can run an example via:

docker$ make -e EXAMPLE=mtu-too-big run
`****

**Note**: Though be aware some of the examples contain `asserts` for testing NFs.

From within the container, you can also use [cargo-watch](https://github.com/passcod/cargo-watch) to handle compilation changes as you are developing:

```shell
docker$ cargo watch -x build --poll -c

Note: you can open additional terminals by getting the running container's container ID from sudo docker ps, and then get to the container with

$ docker exec -it <CONTAINER_ID> /bin/bash

Environment

If you will be doing development work in this repo, you will need to have Rust and rustfmt (latest with nightly) installed, as well as clang and clang-format.

Install these by doing the following:

host$ brew install clang-format rustup && \
  rustup-init -y && \
  rustup default nightly && \
  rustup component add rustfmt-preview --toolchain nightly

Then add the git pre-commit hook to your cloned repo for automatic source code formatting (if you didn't run make init earlier).

host$ mkdir -p .git/hooks && ln -s -f .hooks/pre-commit $(BASE_DIR)/.git/hooks/pre-commit

Dependencies

Building NetBricks requires the following dependency packages (on Debian):

apt-get install libcurl4-gnutls-dev, libgnutls30 libgnutls-openssl-dev,
tcpdump, libclang-dev, libpcap-dev (for dpdk), libnuma-dev (for dpdk)

NetBricks also supports using SCTP as a control protocol. SCTP support requires the use of libsctp (this is an optional dependency) which can be installed on Debian using:

apt-get install libsctp-dev

Look further at the our utils README to understand the layout of our sandbox and design of our Docker images. If you're building NetBricks locally, take a look at how we set out or development VM around transparent hugepages and the loading of modules. Read more about how different PMDs (poll-mode drivers) require varying kernel drivers on the DPDK site.

Tuning

Changing some Linux parameters, including disabling C-State, and P-State; and isolating CPUs can greatly benefit NF performance. In addition to these boot-time settings, runtime settings (e.g., disabling uncore frequency scaling and setting the appropriate flags for Linux power management QoS) can greatly improve performance. The energy.sh in scripts/tuning will set these parameter appropriately, and it is recommended you run this before running the system.