Streamline 1.6.2 review
DownloadStreamline is a high-speed networking subsystem for commodity operating systems
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Streamline is a high-speed networking subsystem for commodity operating systems. It increases performance by moving processing tasks to the fastest location. Streamline supports in-kernel execution, but also dedicated hardware (NICs) and even remote machines. An implementation of Streamline for Linux 2.6.13 and higher is made publicly available.
The goal of Streamline is to make fast network processing viable for common tasks. Many advanced processing schemes so far fail to make it into OSes, because they are difficult to combine with the socket(..) API or only applicable in a few situations. Our goal is to integrate known as well as develop new methods that replace sockets(..). without burdening application developers and end-users. Streamline achieves this by constructing a tailored dataplane for each application at runtime from an extensible set of functions.
Applications request information streams by specifying a 'series' of abstract functions that need to be performed on incoming data (e.g., select tcp packets for port 80, reassemble into a stream, filter out known attacks). At runtime, streamline searches for implementations of these functions. These can be found in the kernel, in the application library, or in dedicated hardware such as programmable network cards or asymmetric multicores. When all functions are found, interconnecting datapaths are setup. Paths may need to cross the PCI bus, userspace/kernelspace barrier or even LANs. Optimisation of these paths is one of the factors that contributes to Streamline's performance.
The base system comes bundled with functions for pattern matching (Aho Corasick, RegEx), accounting, filtering (among others BPF), stream reassembly, rewriting, inspection, and more. Obvious uses are intrusion detection, network address translation, media streaming and realtime (pre)processing of scientific data.
What's New in This Release:
added libpcap backend capabilities
fixed serious bug in remapping from kernel to userspace
fixed minor bugs
made kernelspace compile without need for root priviledges
added auto configuration
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