Renovate high performance user-level stacks' innovation utilizing commodity network adaptors

Today's data center servers are equipped with high speed and complex network adaptors, featuring an array of functions, e.g. hardware TX/RX queues, packet filters, rate limiters, etc. Recent work like IX, Arrakis, MultiStack has made us rekindle the user-level network stacks' innovation ut...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2017 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC) pp. 906 - 911
Main Authors Mao Miao, Xiaohui Luo, Fengyuan Ren, Wenxue Cheng, Jing Xie, Wenzhuo Li, Xiaolan Liu
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.07.2017
Subjects
Computer architecture
Hardware
Kernel
Protocols
Servers
Switches
Throughput
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Summary:Today's data center servers are equipped with high speed and complex network adaptors, featuring an array of functions, e.g. hardware TX/RX queues, packet filters, rate limiters, etc. Recent work like IX, Arrakis, MultiStack has made us rekindle the user-level network stacks' innovation utilizing these commodity network adaptors. In this paper, we revisit the idea to move stacks' design from in-kernel shared space into user-level application-specific dedicated one, for high performance and ease of development and deployment. We provide an unified control plane TAPM to exploit and manage the hardware adaptors' resources, and a dedicated data plane hwTAP to support different user-level stacks. TAPM and hwTAP highlight the utilization of hardware features from commodity network adaptors, to support the innovation of different user-level stacks. Experiments show that the hardware switching module can keep the input rate without any overheads and costs. TAPM could configure the hwTAP dynamically. Our run-to-completion user-level stack also achieves high throughput and low latency.
DOI:10.1109/ISCC.2017.8024641