A high-performance local pub/sub message broker using shared memory as the data plane.
Producers publish to named topics. Subscribers receive them. The key differentiator: message data travels through shared memory — zero kernel copies, near-memory speed. No network stack, no socket overhead for the data path.
Real-world equivalents: ZeroMQ ipc:// transport, LMAX Disruptor, Aeron.
Status: Early development — core data structures defined, broker not yet functional.
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
libaether.so | Client library — publisher and subscriber API |
aetherd | Broker daemon — manages topics, shared memory segments, subscribers |
aether-cli | Admin tool — connects via named pipe for live inspection and control |
Aether separates the data plane from the control plane:
- Data plane — POSIX shared memory ring buffers. Once a subscriber is set up, messages flow directly from producer to subscriber without any daemon involvement.
- Control plane — Unix domain sockets. Clients use these to subscribe/unsubscribe and manage topics.
| Mechanism | Role |
|---|---|
| POSIX shared memory | Data plane — zero-copy ring buffer per topic |
| Semaphores / futexes | Synchronize concurrent readers and writers |
| Unix domain sockets | Control plane — subscribe, unsubscribe, topic management |
| Signals | SIGUSR1 stats dump, SIGTERM graceful drain and shutdown |
| POSIX message queues | Small control messages and fallback for tiny payloads |
| Named pipes (FIFOs) | Admin CLI interface |
| Threads | Acceptor thread, per-subscriber dispatch threads, housekeeping thread |
Requirements: GCC 13+ (or Clang 15+), CMake 3.20+, Linux.
cmake -B build
cmake --build buildOutput binaries will be in build/.
- Lock-free ring buffer (replace semaphores with
std::atomic::wait()/ CAS) - CPU affinity, false sharing analysis, huge pages (
MAP_HUGETLB) - Write-ahead log → replay missed messages (Kafka-style)
- Network bridge between two broker instances (distributed message bus)
- eBPF probes for observability
- Python bindings via pybind11