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Date:      Wed, 7 Oct 2009 12:46:24 -0700
From:      Joe R <apauljoe@gmail.com>
To:        freebsd-ipfw@freebsd.org
Cc:        julian@elischer.org
Subject:   Extension of dummynet/ipfw to support userspace packet classification
Message-ID:  <286e18280910071246r33d33476ya9dd846cd1de6062@mail.gmail.com>

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We at ironport have a requirement to do bandwidth management, but the
traffic classification (and selection of bandwidth pipes) is done in
userspace. The reason classification is done in userspace is because the
traffic classifications are something like streaming audio traffic, video
traffic, based on website categories etc.



Our appliance is based on FreeBSD, and so we decided to look at dummynet to
support our requirement. We could not use dummynet as such because it uses
ipfw for packet classification, where packet classification (and pipe
selection) is done in kernel based on tcp/ip parameters like IP and port.



So we decided to extended dummynet/ipfw to support packet classification in
userspace.

Our idea is to extended socket structure to have a pipe number and have a
setsockoption to associate the pipe number to a socket structure. Then have
a new ipfw target (mappedpipe), which will pass the packet to dummynet
(similar to pipe target) but with the pipe number in the socket structure if
it is non-zero.



I would like to know your comments on this proposal and if people are
interested, I will be happy to submit a patch on this.





Thanks,

Joe.



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