Tutorials

nftables was merged to Linux kernel 3.13, being announced as an ongoing development effort to overcome the existing limitations of the popular {ip,ip6,arp,eb}tables userspace tools and the xtables kernel framework.

The Linux kernel recently added a new MPLS datapath driver and API to configure MPLS fib. This tutorial introduces users to these recent MPLS developments in the Linux kernel and walks through the process of setting up and deploying MPLS with Linux.

Agenda:

• A brief introduction to MPLS.
• Linux kernel MPLS infrastructure.
• Light weight tunnel infrastructure.
• MPLS ip tunnels using the light weight tunnel infrastructure.
• Deploying Linux MPLS LSP and LER routers.
• Futures.

It is clear to everyone that containers are getting a growing part in our world. This tutorial will describe the kernel infrastructure of Linux Container projects, namely the Namespaces and CGroups subsystems, focusing on its network aspects (like Network namespaces and CGouprs networking kernel modules).

This is the suggested agenda of the talk:

Traditionally, much unlike the Ethernet/IP network, classic telecom infrastructure has been running proprietary hardware, operating systems and protocol stacks.

In recent years, some Free Software projects have set out to implement some of the related protocol stacks and network elements on top of Linux, including the unrelated OpenBTS and OpenBSC projects, as well as the less known other members of the Osmocom umbrella project: OsmoBSC, OsmoNITB, OsmoBTS, OsmoPCU, OsmoSGSN, OpenGGSN, and many more.

Building a firewall with netfilter/iptables is an easy task: there are countless of extensions and just imagination limits us. However, in practice the goal is to build a fast and efficient firewall, usually with a large number of rules and that is a not so trivial task. ipset comes to help in that case: most of the rules can be collapsed into fast matches in sets. In this tutorial ipset will be explained in details, both the features with which efficient firewalls can be built up and the internals which provides the fast evaluations.

The purpose of this tutorial is to demonstrate the current state of the art in terms of Linux SR-IOV support. While OpenStack is used to configure the environment, the tutorial content is applicable for other uses of SR-IOV as well.

The tutorial will provide clarity on what can be achieved with SR-IOV today.

Issues found by the author in the OpenStack use case will be highlighted and work in progress to fix them will be discussed.

Agenda:

Linux library operating system, a.k.a. LibOS, has been proposed in the linux-kernel communities with two specific applications and usecases, 1) regression testing environment with a network simulator, and 2) network stack personality with the ad-hoc replacement of network stack (i.e., NUSE). After the patch proposal and the presentation at the last netdev 0.1, it also got may feedback ranging from concerns about maintenance burden to future possibilities such as small operating systems for cloud (*1 *2).

Purpose of this tutorial is to demonstrate setup of 100G switch based on Mellanox Spectrum ASIC. There is no "SDK", no proprietary software, switch is running FOSS, namely Fedora distribution and upstream kernel, including switchdev-based mlxsw driver.

Agenda:

• Quick HW and topology overview.
• Demonstrate mlxsw architecture based on switchdev kernel infrastructure.
• Demo with HW - Spectrum ASIC based switch - bootup, configuration of bridge, VLANs, bonding, run traffic, show statistics etc.

Support for Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) was recently added to the Linux kernel. Core IPv4 support is in v4.3 and core IPv6 support is in v4.4. This tutorial introduces users to the VRF implementation, showing them how to create and configure VRFs, expectations for processes, and commands to show VRF based configuration and debugging. A few typical VRF use cases will be covered, such as basic management VRF, VRFs with VLANs, VRFs with MPLS and inter-VRF routing.