ixy.java is a Java port of the ixy user space network device driver. It has been written with a special focus on readability. It supports Intel 82599 10GbE NICs, also known as ixgbe.

To build this project you will need a C compiler and the JDK 12. A handful script will install all the dependencies needed to build the project and the dependencies needed by other bash scripts.

./bootstrap.sh
source /etc/profile.d/jdk.sh

By default, the driver is built in release mode (a.k.a. OPTIMIZED), with logging optimization (only messages of priority INFO or more are compiled), with the Unsafe object as memory manager and with the path /mnt/huge as the hugetlbfs mount point.

To disable the optimizations, edit the property MEMORY_MANAGER of the root Gradle build script. All the possible values are true or false. Hare you can see a slice of the file (line 44).

// ...
ext {
	// ...
	OPTIMIZED = true
	// ...
}
// ...

To use a different logging level optimization, edit the property DEBUG of the root Gradle build script. All the possible values are right above the property. Here you can see a slice of the file (lines 31-37).

// ...
ext {
	LOG_NONE  = 0
	LOG_ERROR = 1
	LOG_WARN  = 2
	LOG_INFO  = 3
	LOG_DEBUG = 4
	LOG_TRACE = 5
	DEBUG     = LOG_INFO
	// ...
}
// ...

To use a different memory manager, edit the property MEMORY_MANAGER of the root Gradle build script. All the possible values are right above the property. Here you can see a slice of the file (lines 39-42).

// ...
ext {
	// ...
	PREFER_UNSAFE   = 1
	PREFER_JNI      = 2
	PREFER_JNI_FULL = 3
	MEMORY_MANAGER  = PREFER_UNSAFE
	// ...
}
// ...

To use a different memory manager, edit the property DEFAULT_HUGEPAGE_PATH of the root Gradle build script. Here you can see a slice of the file (line 46).

// ...
ext {
	// ...
	DEFAULT_HUGEPAGE_PATH = "/mnt/huge"
	// ...
}
// ...

To configure the Logback logging behaviour, edit the file logback.xml found on the root of the project.

After the build script has been configured, the project can be built with:

./gradlew installDist

Before running it, in case you haven't modified the default hugetlbfs mount path, you can use a handful script to reserve 512 hugepages.

sudo ./hugetlbfs.sh

To ease the execution of the packet generator and forwarder, a helper script can be evaluated to have all the NICs associated to environment variables.

./pci2nic.sh           # To see the variables that will be created
eval "$(./pci2nic.sh)" # To evaluate the export statements

This creates environment variables of the form IXY_*_ADDR_* and IXY_*_NAME_* to associated interface names with their fully qualified PCI addresses. The first * is the driver type (IXGBE or VIRTIO) and the second is the index (starting from 1). To use it in your own scripts you can loop as many times as IXY_*_COUNT says and read the aforementioned environment variables.

To run the packet generator:

sudo ./ixy-pktgen.sh [--batch-size N] XXXX:XX:XX.X

Remember to use the fully qualified PCI address of the NIC; do not omit the prefix.

To run the packet forwarder:

sudo ./ixy-pktfwd.sh [--batch-size N] XXXX:XX:XX.X YYYY:YY:YY.Y

Remember to use the fully qualified PCI address of the NIC; do not omit the prefix.

The packet generator and forwarder demos are located in their own respective Gradle subprojects, namely pktgen and pktfwd. The subdirectory ixy contains a Gradle subproject with the driver implementation, split in several Java packages.

• de.tum.in.net.ixy: contains a simple class to track the statistics of a NIC (Stats) and the base class used to interact with NICs and write custom drivers (Device).
• de.tum.in.net.ixy.memory: contains the MemoryManager specification (to standardise memory access), the PacketbufferWrapper implementation and packet pool implementation, named Mempool.
• de.tum.in.net.ixy.utils: contains static classes to pretty-print numbers, addresses, etc. (Strings), a JNI library loader (Native) and a simple wrapper of the Java class Thread to sleep without having to catch the annoying InterruptedException (Threads).
• de.tum.in.net.ixy.ixgbe: contains the implementation of the ixy driver for the Intel 82599 NIC.

I recommend MoonGen and benchmark-scripts to benchmark the performance of this project. In case MoonGen does not compile due to compiler warnings being treated as errors, execute the following script:

./moongen.sh

It will download the latest commit of MoonGen, remove the compiler flags that might be causing the issue, compile it and clone the benchmark-scripts project along with ixy (and compile it).

ixy.java is licensed under the GPLv2 license.

ixy.java is nowhere close to a production-ready driver! Do not use it in critical environments or on any systems with data you don't want to lose!

Check out the other ixy implementations.