View source for Networking/Archive/Necko/DNS/ResolverIntegration

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= Summary =

We're planning to integrate a DNS resolver into Gecko. Our primary motivation is performance, but we're also interested in a number of new security features such as DNSSEC.

For performance in particular we want better parallelism, access to TTL, better ordering of IPv4 and IPv6 queries.

Primary engineers:
* Steve Workman (Mozilla)
* Josh Aas (Mozilla)
* Wouter Wijngaards (NLNet Labs)

The current plan is to use NLNet's libunbound along with Chromium's OS configuration detection code. We estimate (very roughly) that this will total 100-150k lines of code.

Chromium's code for reading OS configurations lives in their "src/net/dns" directory. We're primarily interested in the list of DNS servers we should be using.

The libunbound code is developed by [http://nlnetlabs.nl/ NLNet Labs]. The libunbound site is [http://unbound.net unbound.net].

= Code Structure =

* netwerk/dns/* directories:
** cache (code for caching results, likely using sqlite)
** os-config (code from Chromium for OS configuration)
** os-resolver (fallback code using operating system resolver)
** resolver (libunbound)

= Work Items =

# [Josh] Bring in system integration code from Chromium.
# [Wouter] Add ability to configure libunbound to build only the library, not the daemon.
# [Wouter/Brian] Make libunbound work with NSS instead of OpenSSL. Do this by making a build-time option to compile with NSS. Brian Smith from Mozilla will help.
# [Josh] Configure libunbound to use minimal threads with 256 query max per thread.
# [Josh] Detect errors using libunbound and fall back to using the OS resolver.
# [Josh] Optimize caching values within libunbound, add subsystem to cache to disk.
# [?] Eliminate unnecessary code and dependencies, perhaps even the entirety of ldns.
# [?] Turn on DNSSEC.