Ariadne is a high-performance software router. Its basic idea is, to feature a clean and expandable programming interface for future developments. At the moment, it only runs on Linux, but porting it to FreeBSD should be easily possible.
Due to Ariadne's design, the architecture can be adapted for the individual needs of an application. In its "base form", simply a router is present, using Netmap as its networking framework. Adding other features commonly found in hardware routers, such as firewall capabilities or IPsec should be easily feasible.
In production, Ariadne can speed up the forwarding plane, because it bypasses the expansive kernel TCP/IP stack, and handles everything it can in user space.
Other programs relying on network connectivity, such as an SSH or routing daemon will continue working as normal. Packets destined to the router itself are re-injected into the kernel stack. Ariadne is designed to integrate itself into a preexisting ecosystem. This functionality is however not currently implemented.
As the Internet is subject to constant change, existing solutions need to be reevaluated and adapted to fit new requirements.
Ariadne enables developers to rely on a user space based framework, written in a solid and common language. Due to its design, new modules can be integrated into the system and pre-existing modules can be withdrawn or extended.
In order to compile Ariadne, some dependencies need to be installed:
- C++ compiler (see below)
- libmnl >= 1.0.3
- cmake
- make
- netmap (headers are sufficient for compilation)
- a POSIX-compliant system
- C++11 ready STL-library
During the course of the development Clang is used as the main compiler. As long as you stick to "Release" builds GCC >= 4.9 should work without any problem. GCC 4.8.5 is known to NOT work in "Release" build because of a bug in the multithreading implementation. If you are having any problem with either Clang or GCC please open an issue. Normally such things are easily fixed, since this projects sticks to C++11 without any extension.
In the following we will build the router out-of-tree, in order to keep the working directory clean. Therefore a new directory is created, cmake generates the Makefile, which in turn compiles the router application.
git submodule init
git submodule update
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j4
./ariadne <interfaces to use>
The best way to learn about the internal working of this project look at its Doxygen.
You can build it by using the doxygen command inside the doc directory.
You may also want to get familiar with the unit-test setup.
All tests are defined by a single .cpp-file in the tests directory.
Every source file is automatically registered to be a test.
As soon as the above build process is finished, all tests can be executed by running ctest inside the build directory.