[dpdk-dev] Request to create a repo under DPDK for Network Function Framework for Go

[Melik-Adamyan, Areg]

Hello.

Within Intel, we developed and open-sourced a DPDK based high-level library and runtime named Network Function Framework for Go (NFF-Go: https://github.com/intel-go/nff-go) which is intended to simplify packet processing applications, especially for cloud-native deployment. Based on DPDK NFF-Go provides higher-level packet processing functions in native Go alongside with simple, powerful runtime.
NFF-Go library itself is not a set of wrappers over 'C' calls to DPDK as that would result in poor performance due to the 300-1500 cycles that can be spent by a context switch. Instead, NFF-Go uses pointers from the DPDK initialization of the device mbuf structures. It permits copying of packet data between Go's safe and DPDK/C unsafe memory. NFF-Go works everywhere where DPDK works.
*Capabilities:* Library provides functions to create packet processing graph from user-defined or predefined functions. The graph can be arbitrary but will need to have a single entry point. The user can freely use both synchronous and asynchronous programming capabilities provided by Go language. Also, auto-scaling is automatically provided by the built-in scheduler using cores as needed, and freeing them after use. NFF-Go provides an alternative development environment for creating network functions using a smaller number of lines of code compared to DPDK/C without sacrificing performance. These capabilities make it possible to implement run-till-completion packet processing model.  The library includes a component called boundary node, which allows consuming packet data from all types of sources: Ethernet, file, memory buffer, remote procedure call and then applying the packets to the processing graph which will be transparently deployed through any cloud orchestration engine.
*Benefit* NFF-Go is based on the DPDK and lowers the entry barrier for bringing packet processing to less experienced developers and push towards cloud-native usages. We strongly believe that NFF-Go is complementary to DPDK. Having a closer link between them should help both projects - it will ease pickup from one source/repo the needed set of features to be used, rather than us just providing a disjointed collection of software projects which are hosted in different places.

We expect the initial commit to include the following:

-          Low, Asm - low-level C and ASM code for gluing DPDK

-          Packet - a library that provides an abstraction for packet and tools to manipulate

-          Flow  - library to provide an abstraction for packet flows

-          Scheduler - runtime and a scheduler for auto-scaling and integration with RSS

-          Examples:

o   Forwarding - simple L3 forwarding

o   Firewall - an example of simple ACL based firewall

o   Tutorial - step based tutorial how to use NFF-Go

o   NAT - an example of production grade Network Address Translation

o   AntiDDOS - simple example of AntiDDOS on L3

-          Automation scripts - helping to build, deploy and test applications on a single host

Thanks,
Areg Melik-Adamyan
Engineering Manager
Developer Products Divison
Intel Corporation