Quant

Quant is a BSD-licensed C11 implementation of the emerging IETF QUIC standard for a new transport protocol over UDP, intending to support the new HTTP/3 standard and other application protocols.

Quant uses the warpcore zero-copy userspace UDP/IP stack, which in addition to running on on top of the standard Socket API has support for the netmap fast packet I/O framework, as well as the Particle and RIOT IoT stacks. Quant hence supports traditional POSIX platforms (Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD, etc.) as well as embedded systems.

The quant repository is on GitHub.

NOTE: Quant implements the QUIC transport layer, but does NOT implement an HTTP/3 binding.

NOTE: Quant is a research effort and not meant for production use.

Prerequisites

Quant uses picotls for its TLS 1.3 implementation. and klib and timeout for some data structures and functions. These dependencies will be built automatically.

The example HTTP/0.9 client and server use http-parser.

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 http-parser pkg-config

On Debian-based Linux systems, do

apt install libssl-dev libhttp-parser-dev libbsd-dev pkgconf g++

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

xcode-select --install

Quant uses the cmake build system and Doxygen to generate the documentation. If doxygen is available, th documentation can be locally built vi the doc target.

Building

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

git submodule update --init --recursive
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:

git submodule update --init --recursive
mkdir Release
cd Release
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make

(I really recommend Ninja over make.)

Building for RIOT or Particle

Please see README.md in the riot and particle subdirectories.

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.

To map the UDP port, run the docker container with

docker run -p4433:4433/udp ntap/quant

Testing and interop

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.

Development and contributing

At the moment, development happens in master, and branches numbered according to the IETF Internet Drafts they implement serve as archives.

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

Copyright (c) 2016-2022, NetApp, Inc. All rights reserved.

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

1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

2. 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.

Acknowledgment

This software has received past 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.