Galette

Galette is an experimental XDP/AF_XDP-based dataplane designed to run service function chains on single-board compute devices, for inexpensive installation and defence of edge networks. You can read more in our paper, due to be presented at IFIP Networking '23.

@INPROCEEDINGS{Simp2306:Galette,
	AUTHOR="Kyle A. Simpson and Chris Williamson and Douglas J. Paul and Dimitrios P.
Pezaros",
	TITLE="Galette: A Lightweight {XDP} Dataplane on Your Raspberry Pi",
	BOOKTITLE="International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Networking 2023 Conference (IFIP Networking 2023)",
	ADDRESS="Barcelona, Spain",
	DAYS="11",
	MONTH=jun,
	YEAR=2023,
}

Components and How-to

Galette is built from some key components:

'chainsmith' -- the compile server responsible for compiling and serving service function chains to clients.
pulley -- the XDP/AF_XDP runtime installed on a host machine doing packet processing.
nf -- a support crate containing types and traits necessary to write dual eBPF/native-code network functions.

Any examples can be run or built using cargo make ex-01, 02, etc. Examples are laid out to show how NFs can be written and composed together with little effort.

TLS

As part of the TruSDEd project, Galette includes mockup code for PUF-based authentication of self-signed certificates via a fork of webpki. The pulley client requires access to a (random) prebuilt challenge-response pair database if connecting over wss:// -- connecting over ws:// does not impose this requirement.

Limitations

Galette does not currently include the capability to dynamically reconfigure SFCs served by chainsmith, or to serve variable map contents. Some map KV pairs are special-cased for insertion from pulley to show the operation of some Map-based NFs.

Requirements

Dependencies

libelf (via elfutils)
zlib

If you are cross-compiling---either to compile pulley for your target SBC device, or to compile userland NFs for another target---you must also install these libraries to your cross-compiler's SYSROOT (i.e., aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc --print-sysroot) in addition to your host setup.

To build eBPF NFs using chainsmith, you will need to install cargo bpf via the redbpf tool suite. Due to its (current) LLVM version restrictions, you will need to have Rust v1.59 installed via rustup.

Runtime

must have vmlinux for target linux kernel?
Kernel on target machine must be built with XDP, eBPF, and BTF support.
Target machine must have libelf and zlib installed, as these are linked dynamically to libbpf-sys.

Paper source and experimental results.

The evaluation harness for galette can be found here. The evaluation repository should be cloned into this repository if you intend to run any of the experimental runners we have developed.

FelixMcFelix / galette