[MPTCP] Userspace Path Manager Draft

[MPTCP] Userspace Path Manager Draft

[Stephen Brennan]

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Hello everyone,

I did not sit in on the meeting since I am feeling sick, so I haven't had a
chance to see whether this is actually a useful contribution. However, over
the past week I've been tinkering with the userspace Generic Netlink
libraries, getting a prototype of what a userspace path manager framework
could look like.

My current idea is built so that it could support multiple path managers,
implemented as shared libraries, which are dynamically loaded at runtime.
There would need to be some policy or logic to decide which connections are
assigned to which path manager; I haven't fleshed out what that looks like.

Without an exact API reference, I simply based the API on what Ossama
proposed last week. To test, I created a dummy kernel path manager which
sends empty Netlink messages. It seems to work so far.

I don't know if those working on the Netlink API have been developing
userspace tooling in parallel, but if not, maybe this will be useful. You
can find it here:

https://github.com/brenns10/pathmand

Hope this is useful!

Stephen

Re: [MPTCP] Userspace Path Manager Draft

[Christoph Paasch]

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Hello Stephen,

On 22/03/18 - 13:41:09, Stephen Brennan wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I did not sit in on the meeting since I am feeling sick, so I haven't had a
> chance to see whether this is actually a useful contribution. However, over
> the past week I've been tinkering with the userspace Generic Netlink
> libraries, getting a prototype of what a userspace path manager framework
> could look like.

Awesome!

> My current idea is built so that it could support multiple path managers,
> implemented as shared libraries, which are dynamically loaded at runtime.
> There would need to be some policy or logic to decide which connections are
> assigned to which path manager; I haven't fleshed out what that looks like.

I see, kinda like a pluggable path-manager in user-space, right?
I like that idea.

> Without an exact API reference, I simply based the API on what Ossama
> proposed last week. To test, I created a dummy kernel path manager which
> sends empty Netlink messages. It seems to work so far.
> 
> I don't know if those working on the Netlink API have been developing
> userspace tooling in parallel, but if not, maybe this will be useful.

I think it will be very useful. I'm sure that Matthieu has also a
path-manager daemon. But having an additional one with other use-cases and
implementations in mind will allow to validate that the netlink API works
for more diverse use-cases.

> You
> can find it here:
> 
> https://github.com/brenns10/pathmand

I will take a look at it.


Cheers,
Christoph