A very high-speed, configurable, and portable packet-crafting utility optimized for embedded devices
Blitzping is a high-performance packet crafting and network probing tool designed for low-latency, high-throughput operation. This project extends the original Blitzping utility with a DPDK-based kernel-bypass transmission backend and a TTL-based traceroute mode with real-time RTT measurement and visualization.
- DPDK-based packet transmission with zero-copy, kernel-bypass I/O
- High-rate packet crafting with precise timing control
- TTL-based traceroute mode using UDP probes and ICMP feedback
- Real-time hop-by-hop RTT measurement and GUI visualization
- Modular design supporting both POSIX sockets and DPDK datapaths
The traditional socket-based UDP stack was replaced with a DPDK-powered datapath. Packet buffers are allocated from hugepage-backed memory pools and transmitted directly from user space using poll-mode drivers, eliminating kernel context switches and buffer copies.
Key components:
- DPDK Environment Abstraction Layer (EAL)
- VFIO-PCI NIC access
- Poll-mode drivers for low-latency packet I/O
The traceroute module sends UDP probes with incrementing TTL values and listens for ICMP responses (Time Exceeded and Destination Unreachable) to identify intermediate hops. Per-hop RTTs are computed and visualized dynamically.
The DPDK backend significantly improves throughput compared to the POSIX implementation:
| Configuration | TXpps (avg) | TXbps (avg) | Avg Latency | Observation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Normal (1 thread) | ~105k | ~23.7 Mbps | 5–6 µs | Kernel-limited baseline |
| Normal (20 threads) | ~5.8k | ~1.2 Mbps | 19–25 µs | Thread contention |
| DPDK (1 thread) | ~472k | ~159 Mbps | — | 4.5× throughput gain |
| DPDK (20 threads) | ~14k | ~4.8 Mbps | — | Queue contention |
Usage:
blitzping <num. threads> <source IP/CIDR> <dest. IP:Port>
Example: ./blitzping 4 192.168.123.123/19 10.10.10.10:80 (this would send TCP SYN packets to 10.10.10.10's port 80 from a randomly chosen source IP within an entire range of 192.168.96.0 to 192.168.127.255, using 4 threads.)
(LLVM/Clang, LLVM Linker, and LLVM-strip)
apt install llvm clang
apt install lld
apt install llvm-binutils
A) If you wish to only compile for your own machine (i.e., host and target are the same), you can run make without any additional options:
make
The compiler will then create an executable for your target device in the ./out directory.
As a final and optional post-processing step, you could strip the debuginfo symbols out of the compiled program and reduce its size:
make strip
1. Install your host's compiler runtime (compiler-rt OR libgcc) for the target machine's architecture:
apt install libclang-rt-dev:mips
OR
apt install libgcc1-mips-cross
While packages of common architectures, such as x86_64 and arm64, are widely supported on desktop-based Linux distros, Debian (for example) does not provide packages for older embedded targets like 32-bit MIPS[eb]. In those cases, if you are not able to manually acquire LLVM's compile-rt:mips for that architecture, you could always apt install libgcc1-mips-cross for libgcc.
2. Then, simply specify your "target triplet" in make; for example, a soft-float big-endian MIPS running Linux (OpenWRT) with musl libc would be as follows:
make TARGET=mips-openwrt-linux-muslsf
Make sure that you specify the correct libc (e.g., musl, gnu, uclibc) and whether or not it lacks an FPU (i.e., if it is soft-float and requires an sf suffix to libc).
Optionally, you can specify the target's sub-architecture to optimize specifically for it:
make TARGET=mips-linux-muslsf SUBARCH=mips32r2
(As mentioned earlier, you could also apt install gcc-mips-linux-gnu and skip LLVM/Clang altogether, if you really want to.)
- C / C++
- DPDK
- Raw sockets, UDP, ICMP
- Linux networking (VFIO, hugepages)
- GUI-based visualization
This project extends the original Blitzping packet crafter.
Core enhancements, DPDK porting, traceroute logic, and performance evaluation were implemented as part of a Computer Networks project.
Blitzping's source code is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later ("GPLv3+"), Copyright (C) 2024 Fereydoun Memarzanjany. Blitzping comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. Blitzping is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; see the GPLv3+. If you wish to report a bug or contribute to this project, visit this repository: https://github.com/Thraetaona/Blitzping