CSL374: Assignment 4 on Network Driver

Goal

  1. The goal of this assignment is to gain hands-on experience with the linux network driver.
  2. You are given the source code for e1000e network driver for linux. You need to compile and load this network driver. This assignment gives you some idea about how open source linux driver code are written and how to understand and make changes to them.
  3. Loading and unloading of a module requires root privilege. If you don't have your own machine we will provide you virtual machine for this assignment.
  4. Please request a virtual machine on Baadal if you want a virtual machine for this assignment.

Steps to compile and load e1000e module

  1. Download the e1000e source code from here.
  2. Untar the files, tar -xvf e1000e.tar.bz2
  3. cd e1000e/src
  4. make clean && make
  5. Make sure that all other network modules are unloaded before loading this module.
  6. sudo ./load
  7. If your system supports e1000 use the source code of e1000 instead of e1000e.

Announcement

  1. In Part B instead of taking the list of IP addresses you can take only one IP address.
  2. Please go through this file skbuff.

Driver compatibility issue

e1000e is network driver for Intel NIC. If your system is using some other NIC you can not get the interface up using e1000e. You can check which network driver you are using by the command,

lspci -v | less

Search for keyword "Ethernet" and you can find which driver your network card is using. The simple way to do this to use a virtual machine if your host does not support e1000. For example KVM uses e1000 network driver as default.

If you want to use KVM install the qemu-kvm package. Create a qemu image as instructed in qemu img. Run the command,

kvm ubuntu.img
or
qumu-system-x86_64 --enable-kvm ubuntu.img

to boot your virtual machine (here ubuntu.img is the name of qemu image).

If you want to use VMware install VMware bundle. Create a virtual machine using VMware. If it is not using e1000 device driver you can try following steps,
  1. Edit the file (using vim/gedit or your favorite editor) os_name.vmx file created by VMware.
  2. Change the line ethernet0.virtualDev = "vmxnet" to ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000" or you can add a line ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000" after ethernet0.present = "true" if it is not already present.
  3. Boot your OS with this new configuration and check the network driver.
To see whether your custom driver is loaded or not you can insert printk statement in various functions of the driver code. printk is similar to printf but in kernel we use printk. The log messages printed by printk are stored in /var/log/kern.log. You can also run the command dmesg to see the print messages by printk. For the assignment Part A you need to insert printk statement in various functions to see which function are called until the network interface is up. For example,

printk("CSL374: %s %d\n", __func__, __LINE__);

will print CSL374: [current function name] [current line number] in /var/log/kern.log.

For the second part we suggest you to look for the functions which are most frequently called when you do some network activity. These are the functions which are called when packets are sent or received. Luckily these are few. Please go through these functions. We think that the networks packets which are sent or received must be input parameters to some of these functions. Please use Linux Cross Reference if you not able to find the definitions of some structures/ functions in the driver source code. Cscope and Ctags are good tools to browse through large source code.

Relevant Material

  1. Linux Device Drivers
  2. e100e-Intel
  3. E1000-manual
  4. Linux Cross Reference

Keywords

  1. Intrusion Ratio = ((total number of packets outgoing/incoming to/from blacklisted hosts whose source/destination is native host) * 100) / (total number of packets outgoing/incoming whose source/destination is native host).
  2. Interrupt Throttle Rate:
    Valid Range: 0,1,3,4, 100-100000 (0=off, 1=dynamic, 3=dynamic conservative, 4=simplified balancing)
    Default Value: 3
    The driver can limit the amount of interrupts per second that the adapter will generate for incoming packets. It does this by writing a value to the adapter that is based on the maximum amount of interrupts that the adapter will generate per second.(See e1000e/README for more details.)

The Assignment(Part A)

  1. Load the custom e1000e module (sudo ./load will do the job). Write calling sequence of all the major functions and a short description about its duties, which are called until the network interface is up.
  2. Unload the custom e1000e module (sudo ./unload will do the job). Write calling sequence all the major functions and a short description about its duties, which are called until the module is unloaded.

The Assignment(Part B)

  1. Implement a module parameter which takes as argument, a list of IP addresses of blacklisted hosts. Your driver code should drop the packets which are outgoing/incoming to/from these blacklisted host and whose source/destination is native host.
  2. Implement a module parameter which takes intrusion threshold(must be between 0 and 100) as a parameter. Whenever the native host sends/receives a packet whose source/destination is native host it will calculate intrusion ratio and set the interrupt throttle rate to 100 and stop dynamic conservative approach(see Keywords), if intrusion ratio is greater than or equal to intrusion threshold. If the intrusion ratio is less than intrusion threshold it will switch to dynamic conservative approach.
  3. Whenever native host sends a packet change the Time to live (TTL) field in network header to 16 if it is greater than 16.

Submission Instructions

Create a svn repo as instructed in tools.
Submit a txt file containing the diff from the original version. For example if revision 1 is the base version run,
svn diff -r 1 > diff.txt
This will write the diff into a file named diff.txt.
You will also need to submit a pdf file which contains the answer of part A. Create a tar folder of these two files and upload on sakai.

Note:

  1. To be done in the group of two.
  2. The last date of submission is Oct 25.
  3. You can also use e1000 driver if your network card does not support e1000e.