The intention of MoonState is, to provide a framework for the creation of high performance state-machines. Primarily it is intended for the use of network protocols in a high-performance setting. MoonState is build from the ground up to accommodate the lack of state awareness in MoonGen / libmoon (created by Paul Emmerich)

It's design follows this figure:

The processing is done as follows:

1. Receive a packet from MoonGen (via C interface)
2. Hand the packet to an Identifier, which uniquely identifies each connection
3. Look up the flow inside a State Table
4. Extract the State data (a void ptr and a StateID)
5. Query the Function Table for the StateID, to retrieve the Function
6. Run the Function (arguments are the void ptr, the packet, and an interface)

The user needs to supply a suitable Identifier (a generic 5-Tuple identifier exists) as well as the IDs of valid states and the Functions to run for the given states.

A minimal example of how to use MoonState can be seen in tests/simple.cpp.

In order to build MoonState you need the following programs and libraries:

• cmake
• make
• g++ / clang++ (c++14 compliant)
• dpdk (see cmake options)
• libnuma

The simplest build is as follows:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j

You may want or need to give cmake more options:

DPDK_INCLUDE_DIR=<path-to-DPDK-headers>
DPDK_LIB_DIR=<path-to-DPDK-libs>
WITH_PCAP=x // If this is defined, pcap is needed