[tor-bugs] #13978 [Ponies]: Get tor working with ns-3

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#13978: Get tor working with ns-3
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 Reporter:  teor       |          Owner:
     Type:  task       |         Status:  new
 Priority:  normal     |      Milestone:  Tor: very long term
Component:  Ponies     |        Version:  Tor: unspecified
 Keywords:  tor lorax  |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:             |         Points:
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 We could use ns-3's direct code environment (DCE) or perhaps their sim
 kernel to run tor.

 {{{
 [14:29] <Yawning> (you know what would be a neat gsoc project?  figuring
 out how to get Tor to play nice with ns-3)
 [14:31] <Yawning> (yes, we have shadow, but ns-2/ns-3 is the standard for
 certain kinds of research)
 [14:33] <teor> Yawning: re ns-3, that would be porting tor to the Direct
 Code Execution environment?
 [14:34] <Yawning> teor: yah, or looking at it
 [14:34] <Yawning> ideally running a full test network
 [14:34] <teor> Do we know how large the gap is?
 [14:35] <Yawning> no idea
 [14:35] <Yawning> last time I was doing this sort fo work, it was called
 ns-2
 [14:35] <Yawning> :P
 [14:38] <Yawning> teor: I was really suprised that they wrote shadow
 instead of extendign ns, but I never asked why they did that
 [14:38] <teor> they?
 [14:39] <Yawning> them tor folks
 [14:39] <Yawning> :P
 [14:39] <teor> It looks like we'd have to avoid clock_gettime in ns, and
 might have to be really careful around threads and processes
 [14:40] <Yawning> yah, it's not something I'd expect to be easy
 [14:40] <teor> According to
 http://www.nsnam.org/docs/dce/release/1.0/manual/html/dce-user-tech.html
 #api-coverage
 [14:40] <Yawning> but it'd be really strong for stuff likelooking at kist
 [14:41] <teor> And we might be missing some important APIs
 [14:41] <teor> s/we/DCE/
 [14:42] <Yawning> hey, that's why I said it was a gsoc project :P
 [14:42] <Yawning> for a really really enthusiastic student
 [14:42] <dgoulet> hrm ns-3 is an offline simulator and by that I mean it
 does not use the OS network stack for experiment, not sure if that would
 reflect correctly reality
 [14:43] <teor> The kernel can be used, see
 http://www.nsnam.org/docs/dce/release/1.0/manual/html/dce-kernel.html
 [14:43] <teor> Well, kernel sources
 [14:44] <Yawning> teor: that's new-ish
 [14:44] <Yawning> but yeah
 [14:44] <dgoulet> ouf work++ to make it work with the kernel eheh
 [14:45] <Yawning> dgoulet:all the researchers do their modeling with ns
 and then write the kernel patches :P
 [14:45] <dgoulet> reserach and kernel patch in the same sentence! wow :P
 :P
 [14:46] <Yawning> yah well the tcp research community is filled with
 interesting people >.>
 [14:46] <dgoulet> Yawning: I guess if you want to implement some new nice
 TCP congestion algorithm in kernel, that makes sense but testing userspace
 app on top of that, does that work well?
 [14:46] <teor> Well, I know what I need to do next, and it's not this :-)
 [14:46] <Yawning> for something like what we want to do in certain cases?
 [14:47] <Yawning> I'd want a lot of the tooling or something similar >.>
 [14:47] <Yawning> but yeah, ENOTIME
 [14:47] <Yawning> and maybe shadow does all of what I want
 [14:47] <dgoulet> right for sure a nice big network simulation would be
 awesome
 [14:48] <teor> Yawning: ENOMEM as well, sometimes
 [14:48] <Yawning> if for say we wanted to move to sctp or a udp transport,
 we'd need simulation capabilities like this
 [14:48] <dgoulet> indeed
 [14:49] <Yawning> (and it's the sort of tool that people that cound do
 "how to make tor faster" would be faimilar with)
 [14:49] <Yawning> just an idle thought, if I find a younger version of
 myself with more time on their hands than I have, I'll suggest it to them
 :P
 }}}

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13978>
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