QUANT – QUIC Userspace Accelerated Network Transfers

QUANT is a BSD-licensed C11 implementation of the emerging IETF QUIC standard for a new HTTP/2 transport over UDP. QUANT uses the warpcore zero-copy userspace UDP/IPv4 stack on top of the netmap packet I/O framework.

The quant repository is on GitHub, as is the documentation.

We use picotls for its TLS 1.3 implementation. Picotls will be built automatically.

Prerequisites

We use the cmake build system.

We use libev as a basis for the event loop that underlies this implementation.

So you need to install some dependencies. On the Mac, the easiest way is via Homebrew, so install that first. Then, do

brew install cmake libev http-parser doxygen

On Debian-based Linux systems, do

apt install libev-dev libssl-dev libhttp-parser-dev libbsd-dev

On Darwin, you must also install the Xcode command line tools first:

xcode-select --install

Building

To do an out-of-source build of warpcore (best practice with cmake), do the following to build with make as a generator:

mkdir Debug
cd Debug
cmake ..
make

The default build (per above) is without optimizations and with extensive debug logging enabled. In order to build an optimized build, do this:

mkdir Release
cd Release
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make

Docker container

Instead of building quant for yourself, you can also obtain a pre-built Docker container. For example,

docker pull ntap/quant:latest

should download the latest build on the master branch. The docker container by default exposes a QUIC server on port 4433 that can serve /index.html and possibly other resources.

Testing

The libquant library will be in lib. There are client and server examples in bin. They explain their usage when called with a -h argument.

The current interop status of quant against other stacks is captured in this spreadsheet.

At the moment, development happens in branches other than master, which are numbered according to the IETF Internet Drafts they implement. The master branch is updated whenever such a per-draft branch is stable.

Contributing

I'm happy to merge contributions that fix bugs or add features. Please send pull requests.

(Contributions to the underlying warpcore stack are also very welcome.)

Copyright

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Acknowledgement

This software has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program 2014-2018 under grant agreement 644866 ("SSICLOPS"). The European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of this software.

kenmcmil/quant