I’m searching for help and an opinion-advice for a network project, in which I’m working lately. This requires a Linux machine to be a passive network appliance.
Network packets come in from one network interface and come out from another interface ( net–eth0–>Linux PC–eth1–>net) without making any modifications on data.
The application, which is going to run on the Linux system, will change only the order of the packets. It is going to be a “silly” network emulator application.
The first implementation was made with RAW sockets, where read() is called every time a packet arrives to user space and write() is called when an Ethernet packet should be sent down to the NIC.
I would like to know if there is a more practical and direct way than RAW sockets, bypassing Linux’s network stack.
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Answer
If what you want is to bypass the kernel, DPDK in Linux and NetMap in FreeBSD are options to do just that.