Project Overview This project, undertaken as part of Google Summer of Code 2023, sets out to implement a robust TUN/TAP driver for Haiku given the increasing demand from the community for a virtual network kernel interface. This project allows for VPN software and other network-related utilities that work with TUN/TAP driver to operate seamlessly on Haiku. Throughout the project’s duration, I’ve documented the rationale behind key design decisions, and offered insights on the interplay between the TUN/TAP driver and Haiku’s unique networking architecture in my series of seven progress blog posts.
Where We Last Left Off Last post, I left off on the problem where the select functionality was working but there are some problems as it works but not well as the average latency is above 2000ms and when using ping it drops more than 60% of packets on average. For two weeks I was working on this issue but I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with select and given that I was coming up on the deadline of my project, I decided to go with a condition variable approach when reading data from the driver for both the application and interface side.
Where We Last Left Off So last time I posted I was able to say that I got the client side for OpenVPN on Haiku working but not the server but I am proud to say that now both the server and client work extremely well now on Haiku :) I was able to get the server from not working to working and was able to get the latency for the entire VPN operation down from 1000ms average to anywhere between 2ms to 9ms (that’s a caveat as that is without blocking which will be discussed later).
Tempered Optimism So great news everyone, OpenVPN and the TUN/TAP driver is working on Haiku! While this is great news for the development of the project, I need to temper it with some problems that the project has encountered now. So first thing that I had to change first was going from TUN to TAP since OpenVPN wanted a Point-to-Point connection for the TUN driver and Point-to-Point isn’t quite a thing on Haiku yet.
The Weekly Problem So we are just past the midway point for GSoC and last update I told you guys that I had a working (albeit somewhat buggy) TUN Driver working. I had gotten great feedback from Pulkomandy, Axel, and Korli to help with a more efficient driver and to make it more human-readable because it made no sense the way I had written it. I have very good news to bring to everyone in that all of the 3 main problems that I talked about last time are all solved!
Sorry for the late blog post everyone! Personal life and some roadblocks on the project got in the way but I am proud to say that the driver is up and working!
Problems, Problems, and more Problems I got the semaphore problem settled, but I then ran into a problem where the data that the application on the interface side sends a packet was then not receiving the packet. Through some debugging I found out that the interface, when it goes into device_consumer_thread for getting the receive function, it fails here.
More updates on the TUN Driver development!
So What’s Been Happening? Thankfully I’ve been able to get a lot more done on the driver this week with finishing the write/sending functionality of the driver and I am currently on the reading/receiving functionality which is getting close to being done. At first I tried to implement a solution in the networking interface (tun.cpp) that didn’t use iovecs but that just caught up to me in the end and it was just significantly easier to copy and paste the code from ethernet.
Intro Hello again everyone! I wanted to write a long overdue update on how everything is going and what I’ve been learning over the past couple of weeks. Due to how my semester didn’t actually end until the 16th, progress has been relatively slow but now that I have more time I can get started on more things with this project.
Understanding the Project Better (If I get anything wrong about anything I am about to say, please correct me!
About Me Hello everyone! My name is Sean Brady, and I am currently in my Sophomore year at Oregon State University studying Computer Science. In early January of this year, I decided to become a contributor for a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project focused on operating systems where I researched Haiku and its projects which interested me and the VPN Support Project in particular. From what I can tell, interest in bringing a VPN to Haiku has been in the works since the BeOS days and more recently the tun.
