Ouroboros Prototype

The Ouroboros prototype is a packet network implementation based on the networking model of the same name. It is developed in C for POSIX operating systems.

Software Architecture

Split in library

Requirements

Ouroboros builds on most POSIX compliant systems. Below you will find instructions for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and OS X. On Windows 10, you can build Ouroboros using the Linux Subsystem for Windows .

Get Ouroboros

You can clone Ouroboros using the command line from its website or, if you prefer from Github or BitBucket.

$ git clone https://ouroboros.rocks/git/ouroboros
$ git clone git://ouroboros.rocks/ouroboros
$ git clone https://github.com/dstaesse/ouroboros

Optional repositories are pyOuroboros, a Python wrapper to write Ouroboros programs in Python, and ouroboros-metrics that contains an InfluxDB exporter.

Dependencies

To build Ouroboros, you need cmake, google protocol buffers installed in addition to a C compiler (gcc or clang) and make.

On GNU/Linux you will need either libgcrypt (≥ 1.7.0) or libssl if your glibc is older than version 2.25.

On OS X, you will need homebrew. Disable System Integrity Protection during the installation and/or removal of Ouroboros.

Optionally, you can also install libgcrypt, libssl (to enable encryption), fuse (to enable exporting internal metrics), and dnsutils (to enable use of a DynDNS server to be used as a naming directory for a UDP layer). Setting up a DNS server (e.g. bind) is out of scope of this installation guide.

Debian/Ubuntu Linux:

$ apt-get install git protobuf-c-compiler cmake
$ apt-get install libgcrypt20-dev libssl-dev libfuse-dev dnsutils cmake-curses-gui

If during the build process cmake complains that the Protobuf C compiler is required but not found, and you installed the protobuf-c-compiler package, you will also need this:

$ apt-get install libprotobuf-c-dev

Arch Linux

$ pacman -S git protobuf-c cmake
$ pacman -S libgcrypt openssl fuse dnsutils

FreeBSD 11/12

$ pkg install git protobuf-c cmake
$ pkg install libgcrypt openssl fusefs-libs bind-tools

Mac OS X 10/11/12

$ brew install git protobuf-c cmake
$ brew install libgcrypt openssl

Installation instructions

When installing from source, go to the cloned git repository or extract the tarball and enter the main directory. We recommend creating a build directory inside this directory:

$ mkdir build && cd build

Run cmake providing the path to where you cloned the Ouroboros repository. Assuming you created the build directory inside the repository directory, do:

$ cmake ..

Build and install Ouroboros:

$ sudo make install

Remove Ouroboros

To uninstall Ouroboros, simply execute the following command from your build directory:

$ sudo make uninstall

Configuration parameters

At compile time, there are a number of parameters that can be tweaked to increase performance or decrease memory consumption, for instance.

Ouroboros build configuration

Parameter	Description	Values (default)	ACK_WHEEL_RESOLUTION	Minimum acknowledgment delay (ns), as a power to 2	(18)
ACK_WHEEL_SLOTS	Number of slots in the acknowledgment wheel, must be a power of 2	(256)
BOOTSTRAP_TIMEOUT	Timeout for an IPCP to bootstrap (ms)	(5000)
CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE	Build type (Release, Debug, DebugASan, DebugTSan, DebugLSan, DebugUSan, DebugAnalyzer)	Release