Is Reimplementation of network stack a good idea or not?

Speaker

Hajime Tazaki

Label

Nuts-n-Bolts

Session Type

Talk

Contents

Description

While playing with a userspace network stack
implementation derived from Linux Kernel Library (LKL),
we are always wondering how LKL is different from a
custom, full-scratch based implementation of userspace
network stacks. The goal of LKL is to preserve Linux
functionalities as much as possible, but it is not
clear how others are far from mature, feature-rich
network stack until people started to play with them
and see difficulties with a lack of functionalities.

This work is our trail to measure how a network stack
implementation is mature.

In order to answer the above question, we conducted
network protocol conformance tests of various IETF
standards (RFCs) across multiple userspace network
stack implementations. We would like to share the
preliminary results, findings of buggy implementations,
and possible testing framework that we can conduct
during daily development.