A fork of Intel's Hyperscan, modified to run on more platforms. Currently ARM NEON/ASIMD and Power VSX are 100% functional. ARM SVE2 support is in ongoing with access to hardware now. More platforms will follow in the future. Further more, starting 5.4.12 there is now a SIMDe port, which can be either used for platforms without official SIMD support, as SIMDe can emulate SIMD instructions, or as an alternative backend for existing architectures, for reference and comparison purposes.
Vectorscan will follow Intel's API and internal algorithms where possible, but will not hesitate to make code changes where it is thought of giving better performance or better portability. In addition, the code will be gradually simplified and made more uniform and all architecture specific -currently Intel- #ifdefs will be removed and abstracted away.
Originally, the ARM porting was intended to be merged into Intel's own Hyperscan, and relevant Pull Requests were made to the project for this reason. Unfortunately, the PRs were rejected for now and the forseeable future, thus we have created Vectorscan for our own multi-architectural and opensource collaborative needs.
The recent license change of Hyperscan makes Vectorscan even more relevant for the FLOSS ecosystem.
Hyperscan and by extension Vectorscan is a high-performance multiple regex matching library. It follows the regular expression syntax of the commonly-used libpcre library, but is a standalone library with its own C API.
Hyperscan/Vectorscan uses hybrid automata techniques to allow simultaneous matching of large numbers (up to tens of thousands) of regular expressions and for the matching of regular expressions across streams of data.
Vectorscan is typically used in a DPI library stack, just like Hyperscan.
Vectorscan follows a BSD License like the original Hyperscan (up to 5.4).
Vectorscan continues to be an open source project and we are committed to keep it that way. See the LICENSE file in the project repository.
According to Accelerate Snort Performance with Hyperscan and Intel Xeon Processors on Public Clouds versions of Hyperscan later than 5.4 are going to be closed-source:
The latest open-source version (BSD-3 license) of Hyperscan on Github is 5.4. Intel conducts continuous internal development and delivers new Hyperscan releases under Intel Proprietary License (IPL) beginning from 5.5 for interested customers. Please contact authors to learn more about getting new Hyperscan releases.
The master branch on Github will always contain the most recent stable release of
Hyperscan. Each version released to master goes through QA and testing before
it is released; if you're a user, rather than a developer, this is the version
you should be using.
Further development towards the next release takes place on the develop
branch. All PRs are first made against the develop branch and if the pass the Vectorscan CI, then they get merged. Similarly with PRs from develop to master.
Vectorscan aims to be ABI and API compatible with the last open source version of Intel Hyperscan 5.4. After careful consideration we decided that we will NOT aim to achieving compatibility with later Hyperscan versions 5.5/5.6 that have extended Hyperscan's API. If keeping up to date with latest API of Hyperscan, you should talk to Intel and get a license to use that. However, we intend to extend Vectorscan's API with user requested changes or API extensions and improvements that we think are best for the project.
On recent Debian/Ubuntu systems, vectorscan should be directly available for installation:
$ sudo apt install libvectorscan5
Or to install the devel package you can install libvectorscan-dev package:
$ sudo apt install libvectorscan-dev
For other distributions/OSes please check the Wiki
The build system has recently been refactored to be more modular and easier to extend. For that reason, some small but necessary changes were made that might break compatibility with how Hyperscan was built.
In order to build on Debian/Ubuntu make sure you install the following build-dependencies
$ sudo apt build-essential cmake ragel pkg-config libsqlite3-dev libpcap-dev
TBD
Assuming an existing HomeBrew installation:
% brew install boost cmake gcc libpcap pkg-config ragel sqlite
In order to configure with cmake first create and cd into a build directory:
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
Then call cmake from inside the build directory:
$ cmake ../
Common options for Cmake are:
-DBUILD_STATIC_LIBS=[On|Off]Build static libraries-DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=[On|Off]Build shared libraries (if none are set static libraries are built by default)-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=[Release|Debug|RelWithDebInfo|MinSizeRel]Configure build type and determine optimizations and certain features.-DUSE_CPU_NATIVE=[On|Off]Native CPU detection is off by default, however it is possible to build a performance-oriented non-fat library tuned to your CPU-DFAT_RUNTIME=[On|Off]Fat Runtime is only available for X86 32-bit/64-bit and AArch64 architectures and only on Linux. It is incompatible withDebugtype andUSE_CPU_NATIVE.
-DBUILD_AVX2=[On|Off]Enable code for AVX2.-DBUILD_AVX512=[On|Off]Enable code for AVX512. ImpliesBUILD_AVX2.-DBUILD_AVX512VBMI=[On|Off]Enable code for AVX512 with VBMI extension. ImpliesBUILD_AVX512.
-DBUILD_SVE=[On|Off]Enable code for SVE, like on AWS Graviton3 CPUs. Not much code is ported just for SVE , but enabling SVE code production, does improve code generation, see Benchmarks.-DBUILD_SVE2=[On|Off]Enable code for SVE2, impliesBUILD_SVE. Most non-Neon code is written for SVE2-DBUILD_SVE2_BITPERM=[On|Off]Enable code for SVE2_BITPERM harwdare feature, impliesBUILD_SVE2.
SANITIZE=[address|memory|undefined](experimental) Uselibasansanitizer to detect possible bugs. For now onlyaddressis tested. This will eventually be integrated in the CI.
SIMDE_BACKEND=[On|Off]Enable SIMDe backend. If this is chosen all native (SSE/AVX/AVX512/Neon/SVE/VSX) backends will be disabled and a SIMDe SSE4.2 emulation backend will be enabled. This will enable Vectorscan to build and run on architectures without SIMD.SIMDE_NATIVE=[On|Off]Enable SIMDe native emulation of x86 SSE4.2 intrinsics on the building platform. That is, SSE4.2 intrinsics will be emulated using Neon on an Arm platform, or VSX on a Power platform, etc.
If cmake has completed successfully you can run make in the same directory, if you have a multi-core system with N cores, running
$ make -j <N>
will speed up the process. If all goes well, you should have the vectorscan library compiled.
The official homepage for Vectorscan is at www.github.com/VectorCamp/vectorscan.
All development of Vectorscan is done in public.
For reference, the official homepage for Hyperscan is at www.hyperscan.io.
Information on building the Hyperscan library and using its API is available in the Developer Reference Guide.
And you can find the source code on Github.
For Intel Hyperscan related issues and questions, please follow the relevant links there.