Vectorscan?

A fork of Intel's Hyperscan, modified to run on more platforms. Currently ARM NEON/ASIMD is 100% functional, and Power VSX are in development. ARM SVE2 will be implemented when harwdare becomes accessible to the developers. More platforms will follow in the future, on demand/request.

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.

Why the fork?

Originally, the ARM porting was supposed to be merged into Intel's own Hyperscan, and 2 Pull Requests had been made to the project for this reason (1, 2). 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.

What is Hyperscan?

Hyperscan 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 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.

Cross Compiling for AArch64

• To cross compile for AArch64, first adjust the variables set in cmake/setenv-arm64-cross.sh.
  • export CROSS=<arm-cross-compiler-dir>/bin/aarch64-linux-gnu-
  • export CROSS_SYS=<arm-cross-compiler-system-dir>
  • export BOOST_PATH=<boost-source-dir>
• Set the environment variables:
  • source cmake/setenv-arm64-cross.sh
• Configure Vectorscan:
  • mkdir <build-dir-name>
  • cd <build-dir>
  • cmake -DCROSS_COMPILE_AARCH64=1 <hyperscan-source-dir> -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=<hyperscan-source-dir>/cmake/arm64-cross.cmake
• Build Vectorscan:
  • make -jT where T is the number of threads used to compile.
  • cmake --build . -- -j T can also be used instead of make.

Compiling for SVE

The following cmake variables can be set in order to target Arm's Scalable Vector Extension. They are listed in ascending order of strength, with cmake detecting whether the feature is available in the compiler and falling back to a weaker version if not. Only one of these variables needs to be set as weaker variables will be implied as set.

• BUILD_SVE
• BUILD_SVE2
• BUILD_SVE2_BITPERM

Documentation

Information on building the Hyperscan library and using its API is available in the Developer Reference Guide.

License

Vectorscan, like Hyperscan is licensed under the BSD License. See the LICENSE file in the project repository.

Versioning

The master branch on Github will always contain the most recent 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.

Get Involved

The official homepage for Vectorscan is at www.github.com/VectorCamp/vectorscan.

Original Hyperscan links

The official homepage for Hyperscan is at www.hyperscan.io.

If you have questions or comments, we encourage you to join the mailing list. Bugs can be filed by sending email to the list, or by creating an issue on Github.

If you wish to contact the Hyperscan team at Intel directly, without posting publicly to the mailing list, send email to hyperscan@intel.com.