Hint about netmap

[Olivier Cochard-Labbé]

On Sun, Jun 1, 2014 at 2:23 PM, Mohammad Badie Zadegan <mbzadegan at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Everybody,
>
> I have a question about netmap(the fast packet I/O framework)
> I have released my own firewall and now I want to test it at the maximum
> packet/s range that available but still I can not select netmap or pktgen!
>
> Does netmap really is faster than pktgen?
> What is the real difference between netmap vs pktgen?
>

Hi,

netmap is "just" a packet input/output framework (like intel DPDK libraries)
: Software that receive (like tcpdump) or generate (like iperf) high rate
of packet need to be adapted to use the netmap framework.
pktgen is a small example of packet generator/receiver using the netmap
framework.

For obtaining a fast firewall with netmap: You need to adapt a firewall
software to use netmap.
The first example of such firewall is netmap-ipfw (
https://code.google.com/p/netmap-ipfw/), but as a userland firewall
separated from the host IP stack, it can be used as a "bridge-firewall"
only and not a classical "router-firewall".

I don't know the status of the current work of adapting a full IP routing
stack to netmap, but it should be not easy: Some company like 6wind (
http://www.6wind.com/) seems dedicated to this task (in their case with
Intel DPDK).

Regards,

Olivier