NetSlices: Scalable Multi-Core Packet Processing in User-Space

Abstract

Modern commodity operating systems do not provide developers with user-space abstractions for building high-speed packet processing applications. The conventional raw socket is inefficient and unable to take advantage of the emerging hardware, like multi-core processors and multi-queue network adapters. In this paper we present the NetSlice operating system abstraction. Unlike the conventional raw socket, NetSlice tightly couples the hardware and software packet processing resources, and provides the application with control over these resources. To reduce shared resource contention, NetSlice performs domain specific, coarse-grained, spatial partitioning of CPU cores, memory, and NICs. Moreover, it provides a streamlined communication channel between NICs and user-space. Although backward compatible with the conventional socket API, the \netslice API also provides batched (multi-) send/receive operations to amortize the cost of protection domain crossings. We show that complex user-space packet processors---like a protocol accelerator and an IPsec gateway---built from commodity components can scale linearly with the number of cores and operate at 10Gbps network line speeds.