Okay, it’s the last day of netdev 2.1! Today there was an exciting surprise! This morning on the subway on the way there I got a mysterious text “julia, are you coming to netdev today?”

When I got there (late), I discovered that I’d won a book!! So now I have this cool Linux Kernel Networking book. It’s from 2014 which is pretty recent and I’m looking forward to reading it.

themes from today:

• netfilter and nftables (which is a replacement for iptables)
• mesh networking (very low-power devices which want to network with each other)
• networking daemons

I think my main practical takeaway from today was “oh man, maybe I don’t ever have to learn iptables, I should maybe learn nftables instead?” :). Not sure yet though! Maybe I still have to learn how iptables works!

netfilter workshop

by Pablo Neira Ayuso

At netdev a ‘workshop’ is not a tutorial, it’s a discussion of new recent advances in the tool. I think this workshop was actually mostly about nftables (which is a new system inside netfilter).

netfilter

If you’ve ever used iptables to filter traffic, you’ve used the netfilter system! netfilter includes a bunch of different ‘tables’: iptables, ipv6tables, arptables, and ebtables.

I think netfilter is also in charge of NAT, which is why it does connection tracking (‘conntrack’) so it can know which connection every packet belongs to.

nftables

nftables is a new packet classification framework that replaces the existing {ip,ip6,arp,eb}_tables infrastructure. The idea is that it’s more unified instead of being 4 different things! That makes sense.

The nftables wiki has a bunch of information. There’s also information in the man page for nft.

Here are a few bullet points about what nftables is from the nftables wiki.

• It is available in Linux kernels >= 3.13.
• It comes with a new command line utility nft whose syntax is different to iptables.
• It also comes with a compatibility layer that allows you to run iptables commands over the new nftables kernel framework.
• It provides generic set infrastructure that allows you to construct maps and concatenation. You can use this new feature to arrange your ruleset in multidimensional tree which drastically reduces the number of rules that need to be inspected until you find the final action on the packet.

There’s a web tool you can use to translate iptables rules to nftables rules.

He also said that the beginning that in some benchmarks, nftables is almost 2x as fast as iptables.

new nftables features

Here are some new features from the workshop

• new extension: fib (“forward internet base”). some things it lets you do
  • drop if reverse lookup fails
  • drop if there’s no destination route
  • drop packets to an address not configured on this interface
  • “works well with Quagga” (which is a BGP thing?)
• new extension: rt (something about routing?)
  • “drop any traffic to 192.168.0.¹⁄₂₄ that isn’t routed via 192.168.0.1”
• new extension: notrack (disable connection traffic)
  • example nft add rule prerouting dport 80 add notrack or something (though i didn’t get it exactly)
• new extension: quota (supports byte quotas)
  • example ip saddr timeout 60s quota over 50 mbytes I think sets a quota of 50 MB / minute per IP src address
• updated extension: payload
  • this lets you update checksums (i didn’t understand this)

I got kind of lost in the rest of the workshop. I did learn that there’s a nftables virtual machine with 25 instructions.

Someone asked in the question period whether they’d consider putting eBPF into nftables – i think the idea is that all these systems (tc, nftables, etc) are a lot for users to learn, and if you could define new stuff in eBPF it would be easier to add features and easier for users to use (because then you don’t have to learn all these different tools, you can focus on learning eBPF). I didn’t hear the answer to this.

morning keynote

by Jesse Brandenberg

what I learned from this keynote

• there are 2.5 million lines of network device driver code in the Linux kernel, and it’s increasing fast
• Linux is moving into a lot of different places
• people are gonna be using a lot more bandwidth (1000x more in the next 10 years?)

on Intel’s direction:

• intel is moving to switchdev (which is a way to program ASICs on switches with Linux, I think? and ASICs are networking hardware?)
• they want to add more hardware offloading capabilities to tc
• “make Linux the best choice for networking”

He said that it’s important to offload crypto operations to hardware. Someone asked “we’ve been trying to do that for a while, but Intel keeps releasing new specialized CPU instructions that make it more efficient to just do crypto in the CPU, is that going to change?”

It also doesn’t really seem clear to me that you can offload crypto stuff to hardware – like he said you can do IPSec in hardware (I don’t really know what that is, something to do with VPNs or something?), but many people are using TLS and I don’t know how you’d do TLS termination in hardware exactly, that seems complicated. He said that it’s not obvious how to do TLS in hardware.

new mailing list: xdp-newbies

As of today there is a new kernel mailing list for people who are new to XDP! Cool! There’s a link to sign up here.

Apparently you have to send plain text email to manage your subscription to a kernel mailing list, so today I learned how to send plain text email from gmail. Also I somehow managed to email the list instead of the list admin address (majordomo@vger.kernel.org). Anyway after several mishaps I managed to subscribe and now I can lurk :D

IoT workshop!

There was an IoT workshop after lunch. This seemed to be mostly about “mesh networking” which is when a bunch of low-powered devices create a peer to peer network.

6lowpan

I had no idea what “6LoWPAN” was so I looked it up! The wikipedia article is pretty good. Basically it seems to be a protocol to send IPv6 messages over very low powered networks.

“low powered network” seems to mean a very specific thing: there’s this standard IEEE 802.15.4 which is like the wifi standards (802.11), in that they define which wireless spectrum you use (902-928MHz in North America) and how you send data “frames and MAC addresses” on that frequency

But the 802.15.4 standard doesn’t actually define how to structure your packets inside those frames, so I think that’s what 6LoWPAN does.

The first talk in this workshop was about “MLE”. what I learned:

• ZiGBee is a thing in the low powered networking world
• There is a protocol called MLE which is for
  • link establishment
  • link quality detection
  • network parameter distribution (what’s that?)
  • I didn’t totally understand though if anyone uses MLE or how it’s related to zigbee
  • MLE uses a “frame counter” as a security feature to prevent replay attacks. This is the second time this week i hear about someone using a counter of some sort to prevent replay attacks so that’s interesting.

LLNs and Linux

by Michael Richardson

A LLN is a “low-power lossy network”. Some of these networks do 256 kbits/second, some of them are as slow as 9600 baud. He said at the end of the talk that there are some wide-area networks (where you send data maybe kilometers) where you might only be able to send 100 bytes per day.

He has a project called unstrung with has a really pretty website: http://unstrung.sandelman.ca/.

some things I learned:

• a thing that exists in the world is “kinetically powered lightswitches” – they only get power when you flip them, and only enough to maybe send a packet before they die. He said he’s never actually seen one yet even though he’s trying.
• maybe you use some of these mesh networking things to power a gas/water meter?
• the wifi in this room isn’t working well because there are too many access points which are transmitting at too high power, and they’re interfering with each other
• so when you have low powered devices like this, you want to only use as much power as you need to – you can do sort of a binary search to figure out how much power you should be using

Increasing Reliability in Data Center Network Configuration

by Tom Distler & Arthur Davis, from NetApp

They’re working on a daemon that makes networking changes. This is pretty relevant to my interests because I am paying some attention to Kubernetes right now which makes changes to networking configuration all the time

design goals:

• provide ACID guarantees around network configuration changes (so if you’re creating 20 network interfaces, you want to get all of them or none of them). That’s a very worthy goal!
• if you crash, you should be able to recover
• applications can ask the networking daemon to make changes

The data model reflects the structures that exist in the kernel (interfaces, routing tables, etc). They don’t try to add any extra abstractions over what the kernel provides.

When a client wants to make some changes to reconfigure the network, they fetch the database from the daemon, make changes, and tell it to apply those changes. So I guess this is kinda like tools like Terraform in a way? (you tell it what the state you want it to end up in is, and then it works to apply that state?)

They said they looked at other systems that did similar things but didn’t say what they were.

The tool they’re building isn’t open source yet but I guess we’ll see what it looks like when it is open source!

closing remarks

The next netdev will be in South Korea in November.

some thoughts on the conference

Awesome things about this conference:

• almost everyone (maybe everyone?) I met at this conference knew WAY WAY WAY more about linux kernel networking than I do. I met people who write linux kernel device drivers, people who work on userspace networking stacks that interact heavily with the kernel, people who work at companies that make network hardware, and more.
• all the people I met were really friendly and happy to explain things to me.
• the talks were often about things I hadn’t heard of before at all. this falls in the category of “awesome things” even though it meant the conference was pretty hard to understand because learning about new things is like.. the reason I go to conferences.
• the XDP/BPF tutorial yesterday was REALLY GOOD, super super well done, I learned a ton from it.

some things about this conference that were different from usual conferences I go to:

• people’s slides had a lot of text and code on them. Usually I think of that as a “bad thing” but actually as long as it’s readable & well organized I think it can be kind of good? like I know that there is a netfilter command fragment ip saddr timeout 60s quota over 50 mbytes to put a quota per IP address because it was on a slide with a lot of other text and I wrote it down
• like on the balance I think I prefer some text/code to cat gifs if the person is trying to explain a code thing to me :)
• they don’t accept recycled talks, your talks is supposed to be kinda original research / a new development in linux kernel networking and not a talk that been given before anywhere.
• they only had men’s t-shirts, not women’s t-shirts. I’ve never seen that before and I thought it was kind of silly, there were lots of women at the conference and in 2017 conferences should have women’s t-shirt sizes :). The tshirt designs were fun though! This was the mascot.

Basically the conference was super-specialized and focused (not for a general developer audience at all!) and that was really awesome because I got to learn a lot about linux kernel networking.

Those are all my conference notes. Blogging this conference has been fun! It made me pay closer attention than I probably would have otherwise, and now I can remember what I learned about! And other people get to learn some of the things too which is of course my favourite thing. A+ would blog again.