🔥 QHTL Firewall: StarLinkGate XDP — Doomsday 🔥
Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2025 4:11 am
QHTL Firewall: StarLinkGate XDP — When Packets Meet Their Doom at 25M PPS From Dark Horizon to Light Speed: The Journey Nobody Asked For But Everyone Needed
Hey SkyRocket fam!
Grab your coffee
(or something stronger 
), because this is going to be a ride. You know how we've been quietly cooking something in the lab since Dark Horizon? Well, the kitchen is on fire and we're serving it HOT.
TL;DR For The Impatient
- 25+ Million packets per second DROP rate
- XDP (eXpress Data Path) — packets die before the kernel even knows they existed
- Three modes: Generic, Native, Offload — pick your flavor of destruction
- Works on Hyper-V, KVM, VMware, bare metal — yes, even your grandma's VPS
- 150MB+ throughput while filtering — legitimate traffic doesn’t even notice
- IPv4 + IPv6 — we block everything equally
- starlink.png (74.08 KiB) Viewed 43 times
The Story: How We Got Here Remember Dark Horizon? That was cute. iptables, nftables, connection tracking… like a bouncer checking IDs at the door. Effective, but the queue was getting long.
Then one night, fueled by energy drinks and questionable life choices, someone asked:
"What if we just… stopped the packets before they even got to the door?"
And thus began the journey into eBPF/XDP territory — where packets go to die faster than my motivation on Monday mornings.
What is StarLinkGate? StarLinkGate is our XDP-based packet filtering engine. For the uninitiated:
Old way (iptables/nftables):
Code: Select all
Packet → NIC → Driver → Kernel Stack → netfilter → "You shall not pass!" → Drop(Packet already toured half your RAM)
StarLinkGate way:
Code: Select all
Packet → NIC → XDP → "lol no" → Drop(Packet didn’t even get a visitor badge)
The difference? About 10–100x performance. Not just closing the door faster — making the door not exist for bad actors.
The Three Modes of Destruction
Generic Mode (xdpgeneric) — Works everywhere, even ancient NICs. Fast (millions PPS).
Native/Driver Mode (xdp) — Runs in the NIC driver. Faster (tens of millions PPS).
Offload Mode (xdpoffload) — Runs on the NIC itself. Wire speed. CPU is literally sleeping.
Generic Mode (xdpgeneric) — Works everywhere, even ancient NICs. Fast (millions PPS).
Native/Driver Mode (xdp) — Runs in the NIC driver. Faster (tens of millions PPS).
Offload Mode (xdpoffload) — Runs on the NIC itself. Wire speed. CPU is literally sleeping.
Features That’ll Make You Weep (Happy Tears)
- IP Blocklist at Ludicrous Speed — Up to 1M entries, O(1) lookup, 25M+ PPS drop rate.
- Smart Port Filtering — Allowlist, blocklist, per-protocol rules. Script kiddies hit a wall.
- SYN Flood Protection — Configurable per-IP SYN rate limiting. DDoS scripts cry.
- Real-Time Statistics — Watch packets dropped, blocked, passed in live counters. Netflix for sysadmins.
The Bug That Almost Broke Us Hyper-V Gen1 testing: Generic mode fine, Native mode killed outbound traffic.
[root@server]# curl google.com
*cricket sounds*
*tumbleweeds*
*existential dread*
Fix: Detect and pass response/egress packets in native mode. Three hours of debugging, one elegant solution, infinite relief. Moral: Always test on Hyper-V. Builds character (and gray hairs).
Benchmarks
Scenario iptables nftables StarLinkGate XDP
Empty ruleset 3M pps 4M pps 25M+ pps
10K IPs 1.5M pps 2M pps 25M+ pps
100K IPs 800K pps 1.2M pps 25M+ pps
1M IPs
Real World Impact Before StarLinkGate:
[DDoS at 5M pps] Server: "I need an adult" | CPU: 100% | Load: 847.32 | Users: "Is it down?"
After StarLinkGate:
[DDoS at 5M pps] StarLinkGate: *drops 5M pps casually* | Server: "What attack?" | CPU: 3% | Load: 0.42 | Users: "Site’s fast today!"
How To Get It Already running QHTL Firewall? Update and restart:
Code: Select all
qhtlfirewall -u
systemctl restart qhtlwaterfallEnable StarLinkGate:
Code: Select all
qhtl_starlink load eth0Native mode:
Code: Select all
STARLINKGATE_XDP_MODE = "native"
What’s Next
- TC egress filtering
- Connection tracking in XDP
- GeoIP blocking at XDP level
- Automatic attack detection with real ML
Credits & Thanks
- eBPF/XDP community — making packets fear for their lives
- Hyper-V — keeping us humble
- Caffeine — for existing
- Everyone who said "just use iptables" — look at us now
Final Words They said it couldn’t be done.
They said iptables was enough.
They said XDP was too complex.
We said: "Hold my packet."
StarLinkGate: Where bad packets come to die, and your server doesn’t even know they existed.
Available now in QHTL Firewall 0.5.8 Questions? Comments? Want to share your DDoS mitigation stories? Drop them below!
And remember: Friends don’t let friends use fail2ban alone in production.
#QHTL #StarLinkGate #XDP #eBPF #FirewallEvolution #PacketCarnage