Vessel

Vessel is a generic container file format optimized for storage and (streaming) transmission.

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The full specification lives at specs.interpeer.io. This is the reference implementation.

There exists an older, partially outdated design document. It may provide some additonal rationale the specifications are missing.

Overview

The purpose of Vessel is to provide a generic container file format suitable for authoring content collaboratively, both in real-time or with eventual merging. It is suitable for encapsulating an authoritative view of the resource, or managing multiple diverging versions. Confidentiality and authentication of content are both supported.

In Vessel, resources are subdivided into standalone extents; a single extent can form a complete resource. Extents relate to their ancestors in a way that permits deterministic ordering at any time, even with partially synchronized resources. In this way, eventual merging is supported. Each extent is created by a single author, but extents from multiple authors can be mixed freely in a single resource.

Note that this functionality is similar, but not the same as a conflict-free replicated data type. It is rather aimed at both providing a good encapsulation format for such functionality, but simultaneously allowing for arbitrary other content to be multiplexed into the resource. In this way, it is possible to encapsulate any, even multiple existing files into a single vessel resource, such as the audio and video sections of media such as DVDs/Blu-Rays.

Vessel achieves this by further subdividing extent payloads into sections, that are assigned to topics. Each topic may carry a content type describing the remainder of the topic's sections.

CLI Demo

asciicast

API

The library is developed in C++, but for ease of integration with other projects provides a C API.

Building

Requirements

• meson for the build system. Meson is most easily installed via python's pip tool. Installing Python als means you can use the android.py script for Android builds.
• ninja or platform-specific tools for build execution.
• Vessel is implemented in C++, and requires some compiler support for the C++17 standard.
• Depending on which scheduler implementation you want to use, packeteer may require specific OS and kernel versions, e.g. Linux 2.6.9+ for the epoll scheduler, etc.
• For convenience, a Pipfile is provided that installs meson and other development tools.

If you're running a recent-ish UNIX-derivative, it's probably best to just download Vessel and try to compile it.

Instructions

1. pip install pipenv
2. pipenv install
3. pipenv shell # the following occurs in the launched shell
4. mkdir build && cd build
5. meson ..

License & Acknowledgements

For the license, see the LICENSE file.

Vessel was initially developed under a grant from the NLNet foundation, as part of the European Commission's Next Generation Internet initiative.