[dpdk-users] Troube with firewall configuration in ip_pipeline

[Matheus Salgueiro Castanho <ms5sh@virginia.edu>]

Hello everyone,

I sent this to the wrong email address first, so I hope this one gets
through.

I've been trying to run a simple firewall with the ip_pipeline example
application but without success so far.

After some initial setup issues, I was able to successfully run the
firewall and add specific rules to it. But the problem is, if I have
understood the parameters correctly, my rules don't seem to have any effect
on accepting or rejecting packets through the firewall.

On my current tests, I have 2 different hosts (10.0.0.1 and 10.10.0.1),
connected to a central host that runs the firewall. This central host
should be responsible for blocking/accepting packets between these two
hosts, but I don't seem to get any packets through. I configure two links
for the ip_pipeline application (config file below) and I check the
connections (and they work) before starting the application. This is the
config file I'm using:

[PIPELINE0]
type = MASTER
core = 0

[PIPELINE1]
type = FIREWALL
core = 1
pktq_in = RXQ0.0 RXQ1.0
pktq_out = TXQ0.0 TXQ1.0

When the application is running, I add these two rules:

p 1 firewall add ipv4 1 10.0.0.0 24 10.10.0.0 24 0 65535 0 65535 0 0 1
p 1 firewall add ipv4 2 10.10.0.0 24 10.0.0.0 24 0 65535 0 65535 0 0 0

The first, as far as I understood the parameters, should accept packets
coming from 10.0.0.0/24 and bound to 10.10.0.0/24, for any TCP port
(0-65535), both for destination and source, for any protocol (protocol mask
= 0) and forward them to link 1, which is connected to the host 10.10.0.1.

The second is similar to the first, but on the other direction 10.10.0.0/24
 -> 10.0.0.0/24.

When I try pinging a host from the other, I can see the packets being
received by the application (command "link ls" shows # of RX packets
increasing gradually) but none of them gets transmitted to the specified
link. The only situation in which I can get packets to the other side, is
when I allow all traffic through the "p 1 firewall add default <link>"
command.

I wondered if the packets were being modified somewhere, so I looked for
the place in the code where the packets were actually being matched against
the rules so I could print them and check. While looking through the code,
I saw that the dpdk ACL data structure was being used to implement the
rules, and after reading the DPDK Programmer's Guide chapter regarding the
acl library (Chapter 22), I saw that the function rte_acl_classify should
be called to match the packets against the rules, but I couldn't find this
function being called anywhere in the code or in the libraries being used
by the application.

So my question is: Am I missing anything in my configuration in order to
successfully run the firewall? Did I interpret the rule parameters
correctly? Or, although I think this is less likely, is the firewall
failing to match the packets against the rules?

I've been working on this for a few days and I can't seem to understand
what's wrong.

I appreciate your kind help.

Thank you.

-- 
Matheus Salgueiro Castanho