NetBricks is a Rust based framework for NFV development. Please refer to the paper for information about the architecture and design. Currently NetBricks requires a relatively modern Linux version.

Up and Running

NetBricks can built within a Docker container. In this case, you do not need to install any of the dependencies, and the final product can be run the same. However to run NetBricks you still need to be on a machine or VM that is correctly configured to run DPDK (version 17.08.1).

If you use our vagrant-based Developer environment, all DPDK configuration is done for you. We also include the MoonGen traffic generator and the Containernet virtual network simulator for testing and development.

Setting up your local Ubuntu-16.04 environment

1. Clone our utils and moonGen repositories into the same parent directory.

   host$ for repo in utils moonGen NetBricks; do \
           git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:YangZhou1997/${repo}.git; \
         done

2. Update and install packages. Any kernel should be generally okay -- we have tested on 4.4.0-131-generic, 4.4.0-142-generic, 4.4.0-145-generic, and 4.15.0-15-generic.

   host$ sudo bash ./utils/vm-setup.sh

3. After step 2, you machine meets the basic requirements of running NetBricks. Now you need to build and bind DPDK using setupDpdk.sh.

   host$ mkdir $HOME/trash
   host$ mkdir $HOME/tools
   host$ ./setupDpdk.sh # in user

   Note: you need to change the dpdk device number in the last line of setupDpdk.sh.

4. Run the sandbox container from NetBricks/:

   host$ make -f docker.mk run

5. After step 4, you'll be in the container and then can compile and test NetBricks via

   docker$ cd netbricks
   docker$ make build
   ...
   docker$ make test
   ...

   Note: you need to change the dpdk device number in the first line of Makefile.

Developing in local Ubuntu-16.04 environment

1. Make sure that you have gone though step 1-3 of last section successfully. Current version of NetBricks will read some DPDK lib from /opt/dpdk/build/ during runtime, you need to copy include/ and lib/ directory from $RTE_SDK/build to /opt/dpdk/build/. Note that soft links need to be considered carefully. We provide setupDpdkCopy.sh for that (actually, setupDpdkCopy.sh has been executed in setupDpdk.sh):

   host$ ./setupDpdkCopy.sh # in user

2. As far as I know, NetBricks assumes you are root when running it. So you need to switch to root now.

   host$ sudo su
   root$ ./setupBuild.sh 

   setupBuild.sh will install the rust nightly, clang, and etc for running NetBricks.

   This NetBricks codebase works on rust nightly-2019-05-22. You can override the rust version in current directory to nightly-2019-05-22 by:

   rustup install nightly-2019-05-22
   rustup override set nightly-2019-05-22

3. After step 2, you need to set RTE_SDK to the dpdk directory, and load cargo environment. Then you'll be able to compile and test NetBricks:

    root$ export RTE_SDK=$HOME/tools/dpdk-stable-17.08.1 # for instance.
    root$ source $HOME/.cargo/env
    root$ make build
    ...
    root$ make test
    ...

   We also provide some commands that might be helpful when dealing with DPDK hugepages in setupHuge.sh.

   Note: when you switch between local deployment and container deployment, you need to sudo make clean to rebuild the dependencies in native/ (especially .make.dep).

   Note: if you find numerous error printed during make build, it is caused by the bindgen (generating rust binding for dpdk); you can solve it by deleting ~/tools/dpdk-stable-17.08.1 and run ./setupDpdk.sh. The specific reason is that you might download my hacked version of dpdk, which will fail the bindgen binding.