CliMB

Abstract

Click has significant advantages for middlebox development, including modularity, extensibility, and reprogrammability. Despite these features, Click still has no native TCP support and only uses nonblocking I/O, preventing its applicability to middleboxes that require access to application data and blocking I/O. In this paper, we attempt to bridge this gap by introducing Click middleboxes (CliMB). CliMB provides a full-fledged modular TCP layer supporting TCP options, congestion control, both blocking and nonblocking I/O, as well as socket and zero-copy APIs to applications. As a result, any TCP network function may now be realized in Click using a modular L2-L7 design. As proof of concept, we develop a zero-copy SOCKS proxy using CliMB that shows up to 4x gains compared to an equivalent implementation using the Linux in-kernel network stack.