
User-space networking with Snabb - quickfox
https://lwn.net/Articles/713918/
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tyingq
Cisco, Juniper, F5, and friends should be watching this trend closely.

I remember the various RISC UNIX vendors ignoring Linux when it was new, a bit
clunky, and short on enterprise features. They missed the head start.

Won't be too long before there are nice ecosystems built around DPDK, Snabb,
etc...and people start replacing their higher end Cisco gear.

~~~
Silhouette
These new technologies are both impressive and useful in several ways, but I
doubt the high-end switch vendors will be losing any sleep over them yet.

People have been talking about SDN and running Linux-based white box switches
that cost significantly less than the name brand gear for years now. So far,
reviews of actual deployments have been mixed, and the market reaction has
been cautious.

Even those platforms are still ultimately running custom ASICs for the actual
switching functions, which gives them a natural and very significant advantage
over anything running under Linux on a general purpose CPU, so it's hard to
see the likes of Snabb disrupting the same market any time soon.

The real value in these new technologies is the extra flexibility they offer
precisely because on a general purpose CPU you can do whatever you want with
the traffic as long as it fits in your time budget. That opens the door to a
level of customisation in network functions that has been hard to achieve in
the past, but right now I'd probably be more worried if I sold specialist
networking devices with five/six figure price tags than if I sold standard,
high-bandwidth switches and routers to the same sort of customer.

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youdontknowtho
Ivan Peplnjack (CCIE Emeritus, networking badass) interview the author several
times on his podcast. It's really impressive.

[http://blog.ipspace.net/](http://blog.ipspace.net/)

~~~
pg314
Lisp people might recognise the name of one of the main Snabb authors, Luke
Gorrie. He started Slime. Always fun to see what he's up to. Andy Wingo, the
presenter of the talk, works on Guile.

~~~
signa11
also was involved in OLPC and distel
([https://github.com/massemanet/distel](https://github.com/massemanet/distel))
i.e. distributed+concurrent emacs lisp (primarily used for erlang development
within emacs)

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mmjaa
SNABB is not just a great networking tool, its also one of the best users of
the Lua VM out there .. I've learned so much for my Lua-based job, just by
looking through the SNABB sources. I highly recommend anyone getting into Lua
to have a few days worth of code-reading ..

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0xbadf00d
Very exciting topic - I would be really interested to see how various features
such as Link aggregation (LACP) and Spanning tree protocol would be
implemented within the framework.

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mcms
If you are wondering what "User-space networking" is, here is a good post by
Cloudflare on their use-case: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/kernel-
bypass/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/kernel-bypass/)

It mentions netmap, DPDK, OpenOnload, etc.

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hermitdev
I'm curious: does anyone have any documentation/resources on how this stacks
up with openonload?

~~~
wmf
OpenOnload is a TCP stack and Snabb is more of a switch/router.

