Threading on Inliniac

Suricata on Myricom capture cards

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 15:22:02 +0000

Myricom and OISF just announced that Myricom joined to OISF consortium to support the development of Suricata. The good folks at Myricom already sent me one of their cards earlier. In this post I’ll describe how you can use these cards already, even though Suricata doesn’t have native Myricom support yet. So in this guide I’ll describe using the Myricom libpcap support.

Getting started

I’m going to assume you installed the card properly, installed the Sniffer driver and made sure that all works. Make sure that in your dmesg you see that the card is in sniffer mode:

Suricata scaling improvements

Tue, 29 May 2012 15:52:52 +0000

For the Suricata 1.3beta1 release, one of our goals was to improve the scalability of the engine when running on many cores. As the graph below shows, we made a good deal of progress.

The blue line is an older 1.1 version, the yellow line is 1.3dev. It clearly shows that 1.1 peaked at 4 cores, then started to get serious contention issues. 1.3dev scales nicely beyond that, up to 24 cores in this test (four 6core AMD cpu’s). Tilera recently demonstrated Suricata on their many core systems, running a single Suricata process per cpu. Their cpu’s have 36 real cores.

Suricata runmode changes

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 07:31:45 +0000

Yesterday I pushed a patch that changes the default runmode from “auto” to “autofp”. The autofp name stands for “auto flow pinning” and it automatically makes sure all packets belonging to a flow are processed by the same stream, detection and output thread. Until now, the assignment was done with a simple hash calculation. The problem with that is that it doesn’t take into account how busy a thread may be.

Listening on multiple interfaces with Suricata

Fri, 24 Dec 2010 13:13:24 +0000

A question I see quite often is, can I listen on multiple interfaces with a single Suricata instance? Until now the answer always was “no”. I’d suggest trying the “any”-pseudo interface (suricata -i any), with an bpf to limit the traffic or using multiple instances of Suricata. That last suggestion was especially painful, as one of the goals of Suricata is to allow a single process to process all packets using all available resources.