2017 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC)
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Abstract

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.
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