LuaJIT + DPDK = fast and flexible packet processing at speeds above 100 Gbit/s.
Read and try out one of the examples to get started.
Phobos started out as the packet generator MoonGen which evolved into a more general framework for packet processing. You can read our original IMC 2015 Research Paper (BibTeX) for a discussion of our architecture which remained unchanged throughout this transition. Please use this paper as a canonical reference to Phobos if you are writing a paper or thesis.
Phobos is a high-speed framework to develop DPDK applications in Lua and C/C++. Its main goal is to simplify the initial creation of new DPDK applications by providing a concise and solid framework to build upon. The core is a Lua wrapper for DPDK that simplifies operations that are typically extremely verbose in DPDK, e.g., device initialization. Phobos also simplifies protocol implementations and tests by providing an extensible packet header processing and parsing library.
Explicit multi-core support is at the heart of Phobos. Scripts define a master task that is executed on startup. This task configures devices and queues and then starts one or more slave tasks that then handle packet IO.
Note that Lua does not have any native support for multi-threading. Phobos therefore starts a new and completely independent LuaJIT VM for each task. Tasks can only share state through communication primitives provided by Phobos. The example script inter-task-communication.lua showcases the available communication methods.
The MoonGen packet generator features user scripts that are essentially small Phobos applications. Hence, MoonGen's examples may be useful.
FlowScope is a traffic analysis tool using Phobos. It's a good example on integration Phobos with custom C++ code.
Just run build.sh, bind-interfaces.sh, and setup-hugetlbfs.sh
# install dependencies and compile phobos
sudo apt-get install git build-essential cmake linux-headers-`uname -r` lshw
git clone https://github.com/Phobos-Framework/phobos
cd phobos
./build.sh
# bind all NICs that are not actively used (no IP configured) to DPDK
sudo ./bind-interfaces.sh
# configure hugetlbfs
sudo ./setup-hugetlbfs.sh
# run the hello-world example
sudo ./build/phobos examples/hello-world.lua
Note: Use deps/dpdk/tools/dpdk-devbind.py to manage NIC drivers manually to get them back into the OS.
- gcc >= 4.8
- make
- cmake
- kernel headers (for the DPDK igb-uio driver)
- lspci (for dpdk-devbind.py)
Phobos supports all NICs supported by DPDK. Note that some NICs (e.g., Mellanox) require external components to work with DPDK. Refer to the DPDK documentation for further information. We test and develop Phobos on various NICs of the ixgbe, i40e, and igb family.
It's easier to get started. Seriously, have you tried reading one of the DPDK examples?
Snabb has a completely different approach. They build their own drivers and generally do not rely on hardware capabilities (e.g., filtering and offloading). Phobos is just a wrapper for DPDK and heavily uses hardware-specific features.
We think that our framework is sufficiently different from other projects with the same name to not cause confusion. The name was chosen as a reference to MoonGen and Lua.