Hacker News Reader

Comment by ignoramous | Hacker News Reader

A note: wireguard-go (the official userspace impl in golang) can do this since several months back. It uses gVisor's netstack as a tcp/udp provider to forward connections to its peer (compared to whitequark's smoltcp in case of onetun).

Here's a demonstration of both a http-client and a http-server running over wireguard (a poor man's QUIC, if you will): https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-go/tree/master/tun/ne...

fly.io wrote about such a setup not long ago too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26315695

And tailscale.com similarly uses wireguard with netstack to impl functionality unavailable on non-Linux/xBSD platforms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28261683

View on HN

Can I just put another word in for how bananas this is? WireGuard and Netstack allows you to run an entire TCP/IP stack in your userland program with no cooperation from your kernel. You can an interface to write raw packets (as an unprivileged user) and the whole TCP, integrated into the standard Go networking code. It is very, very cool to play with.

Yup! This is how onetun works as well (but :%s/Netstack/smoltcp/g in Rust)

This reminds me a lot of lwIP[0] and uIP[1]. I did some projects 15 years ago with lwIP where we were able to work around a very lossy wireless network link when controlling PTZ cameras by building what was essentially a proxy with lwIP that allowed us to do some hack-ish things like transmitting 2 copies of all TCP packets immediately to increase resiliency. As I recall it exposed the BSD socket API so it was shockingly easy to relink a project to use lwIP instead of the host OS. All that was needed then on the other end was hooking up lwIP to a raw network interface.

[0] https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/lwip/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UIP_(micro_IP)

Yeah! In Orchid, we have a similar setup to these, letting me layer lwIP on top of Wireguard, OpenVPN, or our WebRTC-based VPN protocol, even in multi-hop configurations.

Hi Saurik: Since LwIP only provides handlers for TCP and UDP, doesn't that reduce Orchid's VPN to a TCP/UDP proxy? For ex, can Orchid handle (or intends to handle) SCTP, say?

Or, is LwIP more capable than what I it give credit for?

(by the way, thank you for building orchid in the open! looking forward to the eventual team-up between orchid and helium :)

> transmitting 2 copies of all TCP packets immediately

U wot m8?

In a thread about bananas userland TCP this Cat got a whole sundae.

Thanks for the links, I'll have to take some inspiration from wireguard-go!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com