Bytebricks - A Generic High Performance VPN Framework - William Lam, TikTok

Bytebricks - A Generic High Performance VPN Framework - William Lam, TikTok
Traditional scalar packet processing has typically always been the first choice when it comes to designing an application's dataplane due to its simplicity enabling fast prototyping and deployment. However, in certain types of applications, for example VPN gateways which support various underlying protocols, using a scalar pipeline might not be the best option when considering the ability to extend and generalise the application. In this lightning talk, we present Bytebricks - a generic VPN framework that primarily leverages DPDK’s graph library to enable the running different VPN protocols together in the same packet processing pipeline. We will share our experience in effectively utilising the graph library to produce promising performance results which greatly exceed existing mainstream VPN applications. While Bytebricks' flexible design is intended to support multiple protocols, the first implementation target has been Wireguard. However, making Wireguard multi-core poses its own challenges due to its reliance on timers. Therefore, Bytebricks also demonstrates an effective method for using timers in a scalable multi-core environment.
Accelerating Network Performance - The most popular kit to accelerate packet processing on a wide variety of CPU architectures Designed to run on x86, POWER and ARM processors, DPDK is a set of libraries running mostly in Linux userland, with a FreeBSD port available for a subset of features. www.dpdk.org/