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Data centers require high-performance and efficient networking for fast and reliable communication between applications. TCP/IP-based networking still plays a dominant role in data center networking to support a wide range of Layer-4 and Layer-7 applications, such as middleboxes and cloud-based microservices. However, traditional kernel-based TCP/IP stacks face performance challenges due to overheads such as context switching, interrupts, and copying. We present Z-stack, a high-performance userspace TCP/IP stack with a zero-copy design. Utilizing DPDK's Poll Mode Driver, Z-stack bypasses the kernel and moves packets between the NIC and the protocol stack in userspace, eliminating the overhead associated with kernel-based processing. Z-stack em-ploys polling-based packet processing that improves performance under high loads, and eliminates receive livelocks compared to interrupt-driven packet processing. With its zero-copy socket design, Z-stack eliminates copies when moving data between the user application and the protocol stack, which further minimizes latency and improves throughput. In addition, Z-stack seamlessly integrates with shared memory processing within the node, eliminating duplicate protocol processing and serializationldese-rialization overheads for intra-node communication. Z-stack uses F-stack as the starting point which integrates the proven TCP/IP stack from FreeBSD, providing a versatile solution for a variety of cloud use cases and improving performance of data center networking.
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X-IO: A High-performance Unified I/O Interface using Lock-free Shared Memory Processing
Cloud-native microservice applications use different communication paradigms to network microservices, including both synchronous and asynchronous I/O for exchanging data. Existing solutions depend on kernel-based networking, incurring significant overheads. The interdependence between microservices for these applications involves considerable communication, including contention between multiple concurrent flows or user sessions. In this paper, we design X-IO, a high-performance unified I/O interface that is built on top of shared memory processing with lock-free producer/consumer rings, eliminating kernel networking overheads and contention. X-IO offers a feature-rich interface. X-IO’s zero-copy interface supports building provides truly zero-copy data transfers between microservices, achieving high performance. X-IO also provides a POSIX-like socket interface using HTTP/REST API to achieve seamless porting of microservices to X-IO, without any change to the application code. X-IO supports concurrent connections for microservices that require distinct user sessions operating in parallel. Our preliminary experimental results show that X-IO’s zero-copy interfaces achieve 2.8x-4.1x performance improvement compared to kernel-based interfaces. Its socket interfaces outperform kernel TCP sockets and achieve performance close to UNIX-domain sockets. The HTTP/REST APIs in X-IO perform 1.4 x-2.3 x better than kernel-based alternatives with concurrent connections.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1823270
- PAR ID:
- 10480222
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2023 IEEE 9th International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft)
- ISBN:
- 979-8-3503-9980-6
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 107 to 115
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Madrid, Spain
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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