enricobuehlerandClaude Fable 5
d8d8c6c43d
The startup speed-test probe deliberately overloads the link (2 Gb/s for 800 ms) to measure capacity. The report tick is suppressed while it runs and the window anchors are rebased when it ends — but two residues leak past the rebase: probe frames still pending in the reassembler age out as frames_dropped for another ~120 ms (the loss-window fuse), and the burst can latch flush_in_window (a jump-to-live it caused itself). Either one reads as a SEVERE window: the controller backs off ×0.7 and — worse — slow start ends at the first congestion signal, permanently. That is precisely the 2026-07 field report's Automatic session: 20→14 Mb/s exactly one report tick after the probe, then a purely additive +6 %/4.5 s crawl that took the whole 4.5-minute match to reach 308 Mb/s on a link the probe had just measured at ~1.2 Gb/s. Slow start (doubling per clean window to the probed ceiling, 'seconds instead of minutes') never got to run. The first post-probe report window is now discarded outright: no LossReport (probe residue would also spike the host's adaptive FEC), the standing-latency detector closes it as not-loss-free (its clean-run just resets), and the ABR is fed nothing. 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