PFQ is a functional networking framework designed for the Linux operating system that allows efficient packets capture/transmission (10G and beyond), in-kernel functional processing and packets steering across sockets/end-points.

PFQ is highly optimized for multi-core architecture, as well as for network devices equipped with multiple hardware queues. It works with any network device driver and provides a script designed to obtain accelerated versions starting from source codes.

The framework enables the development of high-performance networking applications with different programming languages: C, C++ and Haskell. In addition, a pure functional language designed for early stages in-kernel applications is included: pfq-lang.

pfq-lang is inspired by Haskell and allows the creation of small applications that run in kernel space, on top of network device drivers. Through pfq-lang it is possible to build efficient bridges, port mirrors, simple firewalls, network balancers and so forth.

The package provides the source code of the PFQ kernel module, user-space libraries for C, C++11-14 and Haskell language, an implementation of pfq-lang as eDSL for both C++11-14 and Haskell, and a set of diagnostic tools.

• Full lock-free architecture.
• Preallocated pools of socket buffers.
• Compliant with a plethora of network devices drivers.
• Rx and Tx line-rate on 10G links (14,8 Mpps), on-top-of Intel ixgbe vanilla drivers.
• Transparent support of kernel threads for asynchronous packets transmission.
• Asynchronous transmission with active timestamping (which determines when to transmit a packet).
• Concurrent monitoring of multiple multi-threaded applications by means of groups of sockets.
• Per-group packet steering through randomized hashing or deterministic classification.
• Per-group Berkeley and VLAN filters.
• Functional engine for in-kernel packet processing with pfq-lang.
• User-space libraries for C, C++11-14 and Haskell languages.
• pfq-lang eDLS for C++11-14 and Haskell language.
• Accelerated pcap library (line-speed tested with captop).
• pfqd daemon used to parallelize multiple instances of pcap legacy applications.
• pfq-omatic, a script designed to accelerate vanilla drivers.
• I/O user<->kernel shared-memory on top of HugePages.

• "PFQ: a Novel Engine for Multi-Gigabit Packet Capturing With Multi-Core Commodity Hardware": Best-Paper-Award at PAM2012 in Vienna http://tma2012.ftw.at/papers/PAM2012paper12.pdf
• "A Purely Functional Approach to Packet Processing": ANCS 2014 Conference (October 2014, Marina del Rey)

Nicola Bonelli nicola@pfq.io

Andrea Di Pietro andrea.dipietro@for.unipi.it

Loris Gazzarrini loris.gazzarrini@iet.unipi.it

Gregorio Procissi g.procissi@iet.unipi.it

Luca Abeni abeni@dit.unitn.it

PFQ home-page is www.pfq.io. Additional information are available at netgroup/pfq.