The streamed-AU path only ever flushed a block when a full FEC block's worth of bytes accumulated - at real bitrates a frame finished encoding before that, so every AU degenerated to one tail-heavy send and the overlap the sentinel wire was built for never happened. Now a slice boundary flushes every whole shard (floored at MIN_STREAM_BLOCK_SHARDS so per-block parity stays economical), which means blocks are variable-size and can no longer be addressed by the uniform block_index * K_max formula. USER_FLAG_SLICE_STREAM marks such frames on every packet: sentinel blocks reuse frame_bytes as their shard-aligned base offset, the final block's base derives from the totals, and the receiver pins/validates positionally (sentinels must sit strictly below the final block's base; a mixed-flag or out-of-range header is dropped before it can place a byte). The AU's own flag bit gates the wire shape, and the host sets it only toward clients advertising STREAMED_AU + MULTI_SLICE, so shipped receivers keep seeing the byte-identical legacy sentinel (PUNKTFUNK_SLICE_STREAM=0 pins legacy for A/B). Both sides bound the per-frame block count by the same floored formula, and the flush loop cuts as many blocks as a chunk completes - a slice bigger than one FEC block can't leave an oversized final block behind. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
punktfunk-core
The shared protocol core — the one place where punktfunk's transport, forward error correction, and crypto live. It's linked into the host and every native client, so there's exactly one implementation of the wire format everywhere.
Written in Rust with no async on the per-frame path (native threads only). It exposes both a normal Rust API and a stable, versioned C ABI, so the Swift and Kotlin clients — and any C embedder — link the same code as the Rust ones.
What's in here
- Transport & session (
session.rs,transport/,packet.rs) — thepunktfunk/1data plane over raw UDP: packetization, reassembly (with attacker-bounded limits), pacing, and socket tuning. - FEC (
fec/) — the wall-breaker. Two codes:- GF(2⁸) classic Reed–Solomon with the Cauchy generator matrix — byte-identical to the
nanorslibrary Moonlight uses, so our parity is decodable by a stock Moonlight client. - GF(2¹⁶) Leopard-RS (SIMD, O(n log n)) — up to 65535 shards/block, which removes the ~1 Gbps
FEC ceiling.
punktfunk/1negotiates this one.
- GF(2⁸) classic Reed–Solomon with the Cauchy generator matrix — byte-identical to the
- Crypto (
crypto.rs) — AES-128-GCM session encryption with per-direction nonce salts and sequence-as-AAD; SPAKE2 PIN pairing lives behind thequicfeature. - QUIC control plane (
quic.rs,client.rs, featurequic) — the Hello/Welcome/Start handshake, cert pinning/TOFU, reverse audio, and the embeddableNativeClientconnector. This is the only placetokio/quinnare allowed; the feature is off by default so the core stays runtime-free. - C ABI (
abi.rs) — the versioned surface (punktfunk_abi_version(),PunktfunkConfigcarrying its ownstruct_size) that generatesinclude/punktfunk_core.hvia cbindgen at build time.
Build outputs
The crate builds three ways at once (crate-type = ["lib", "cdylib", "staticlib"]):
| Output | Used by |
|---|---|
lib (rlib) |
the host, probe, and tools link it as a normal Rust crate |
cdylib (.so/.dylib) |
the Swift / Kotlin clients via the C ABI |
staticlib (.a) |
the C test harness and static embedding |
Test
cargo test -p punktfunk-core # unit + proptest + loopback
cargo run -p loss-harness # FEC loss-resilience sweep (no network needed)
bash crates/punktfunk-core/tests/c/run.sh # standalone C-ABI link + round-trip proof
Design invariants (do not regress)
- One core, linked everywhere — protocol/FEC/crypto live only here, behind the stable C ABI.
- No async on the hot path — the per-frame pipeline is native threads only;
quic(tokio/quinn) is control-plane only, feature-gated, off by default. - Security hardening stays intact — the reassembler bounds attacker-controlled fields before
allocating; AES-GCM keeps per-direction nonce salts + seq-as-AAD; the ABI checks
struct_size. Regression tests exist — keep them green.
Related
punktfunk-host— the streaming host built on this core- Clients — the apps that link this core over the C ABI (or directly, in Rust)
- punktfunk-planning:
implementation-plan.md(internal planning repo) — why GF(2¹⁶) FEC, the latency budget, and the architecture thesis