The Chimera Project is an open-source effort focused on building high-performance userspace storage infrastructure for modern NAS systems and distributed storage applications.
At the center of the project is a userspace virtual file system architecture that exposes NAS protocol semantics directly to applications and backends rather than forcing everything through traditional POSIX interfaces. Chimera is designed around a fully asynchronous runtime with zero-copy data paths, enabling efficient implementations of protocols such as NFS, SMB, and S3 while supporting modern networking and storage technologies including RDMA, io_uring, NVMe, and kernel-bypass networking.
The long-term goal is to provide a flexible foundation for building scalable storage systems, protocol servers, benchmarks, and next-generation filesystems optimized for high concurrency and low overhead.
| Project | Description |
|---|---|
| chimera | High-performance multi-protocol NAS stack implementing NFS, SMB, and S3 on a unified asynchronous userspace VFS architecture |
| libevpl | General-purpose asynchronous runtime and high-performance networking/storage event library |
| flowbench | High-speed network benchmark and profiling tool built on libevpl |
- Website: https://chimeraproject.io
- Discord: https://discord.gg/hnRkvQFecq
