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1. X-IO: A High-performance Unified I/O Interface using Lock-free Shared Memory Processing

   https://doi.org/10.1109/NetSoft57336.2023.10175428  

   Qi, Shixiong; Tsai, Han-Sing; Liu, Yu-Sheng; Ramakrishnan, K. K.; Chen, Jyh-Cheng (June 2023, 2023 IEEE 9th International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft))

   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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2. MiddleNet: A High-Performance, Lightweight, Unified NFV and Middlebox Framework

   https://doi.org/10.1109/NetSoft54395.2022.9844083  

   Zeng, Ziteng; Monis, Leslie; Qi, Shixiong; Ramakrishnan, K. K. (June 2022, 2022 IEEE 8th International Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft))

   Traditional network resident functions (e.g., firewalls, network address translation) and middleboxes (caches, load balancers) have moved from purpose-built appliances to software-based components. However, L2/L3 network functions (NFs) are being implemented on Network Function Virtualization (NFV) platforms that extensively exploit kernel-bypass technology. They often use DPDK for zero-copy delivery and high performance. On the other hand, L4/L7 middleboxes, which usually require full network protocol stack support, take advantage of a full-fledged kernel-based system with a greater emphasis on functionality. Thus, L2/L3 NFs and middleboxes continue to be handled by distinct platforms on different nodes.This paper proposes MiddleNet that seeks to overcome this dichotomy by developing a unified network resident function framework that supports L2/L3 NFs and L4/L7 middleboxes. MiddleNet supports function chains that are essential in both NFV and middlebox environments. MiddleNet uses DPDK for zero-copy packet delivery without interrupt-based processing, to enable the ‘bump-in-the-wire’ L2/L3 processing performance required of NFV. To support L4/L7 middlebox functionality, MiddleNet utilizes a consolidated, kernel-based protocol stack processing, avoiding a dedicated protocol stack for each function. MiddleNet fully exploits the event-driven capabilities provided by the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) and seamlessly integrates it with shared memory for high-performance communication in L4/L7 middlebox function chains. The overheads for MiddleNet are strictly load-proportional, without needing the dedicated CPU cores of DPDK-based approaches. MiddleNet supports flow-dependent packet processing by leveraging Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) to dynamically select packet processing needed (Layer 2 to Layer 7). Our experimental results show that MiddleNet can achieve high performance in such a unified environment. 

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3. PRISM: Streamlined Packet Processing for Containers with Flow Prioritization

   Manish Munikar, Jiaxin Lei (July 2022, 42nd IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems)

   Advanced high-speed network cards have made packet processing in host operating systems a major performance bottleneck. The kernel network stack gives rise to various sources of overheads that limit the throughput and lengthen the per-packet processing latency. The problem is further exacerbated for short-lived, latency-sensitive network flows such as control packets, online gaming, database requests, etc. — in a highly utilized system, especially in virtualized (containerized) cloud environments, short flows can experience excessively long in-kernel queuing delays. As a consequence, recent research works propose to bypass the kernel network stack to enable lightweight, custom userspace network stacks for improved performance, but at a heavy cost of compatibility and security. In this paper, we take a different approach: We first analyze various sources of inefficiencies in the kernel network stack and propose ways to mitigate them without compromising systems compatibility, security, or flexibility. Further, we propose PRISM, a novel mechanism in the kernel network stack to differentiate incoming packets based on their performance requirements and streamline the processing stages of multi-stage packet processing pipelines (e.g., in container overlay networks). Our evaluation demonstrates that PRISM can significantly improve the latency of high-priority flows in container overly networks in the presence of heavy low-priority background traffic. 

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4. Userspace Networking in gem5

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ISPASS61541.2024.00026  

   Umeike, Johnson; Agarwal, Siddharth; Lazarev, Nikita; Alian, Mohammad (May 2024, IEEE)

   Full-system simulation of computer systems is critical for capturing the complex interplay between various hard-ware and software components in future systems. Modeling the network subsystem is indispensable for the fidelity of full-system simulations due to the increasing importance of scale-out systems. Over the last decade, the network software stack has undergone major changes, with userspace networking stacks and data-plane networks rapidly replacing the conventional kernel network stack. Nevertheless, the current state-of-the-art architectural simulator, gem5, still employs kernel networking, which precludes realistic network application scenarios. In this work, we first demonstrate the limitations of gem5's current network stack in achieving high network bandwidth. Then, we enable a userspace networking stack on gem5. We extend gem5's NIC hardware model and device driver to sup-port userspace device drivers running the DPDK framework. Additionally, we implement a network load generator hardware model in gem5 to generate various traffic patterns and per-form per-packet timestamp and latency measurements without introducing packet loss. We develop a suite of six network-intensive benchmarks for stress testing the host network stack. These applications, based on DPDK, can run on both gem5 and real systems. Our experimental results show that enabling userspace networking improves gem5's network bandwidth by 6.3× compared with the current Linux kernel software stack. We characterize the performance of DPDK benchmarks running on both a real system and gem5, and evaluate the sensitivity of the applications to various system and microarchitecture parameters. This work marks the first step in refactoring the networking subsystem in gem5. 

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5. TAS: TCP Acceleration as an OS Service

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3302424.3303985  

   Kaufmann, Antoine; Stamler, Tim; Peter, Simon; Sharma, Naveen Kr.; Krishnamurthy, Arvind; Anderson, Thomas (March 2019, Proceedings of the Fourteenth EuroSys Conference 2019)

   As datacenter network speeds rise, an increasing fraction of server CPU cycles is consumed by TCP packet processing, in particular for remote procedure calls (RPCs). To free server CPUs from this burden, various existing approaches have attempted to mitigate these overheads, by bypassing the OS kernel, customizing the TCP stack for an application, or by offloading packet processing to dedicated hardware. In doing so, these approaches trade security, agility, or generality for efficiency. Neither trade-off is fully desirable in the fast-evolving commodity cloud. We present TAS, TCP acceleration as a service. TAS splits the common case of TCP processing for RPCs in the datacenter from the OS kernel and executes it as a fastpath OS service on dedicated CPUs. Doing so allows us to streamline the common case, while still supporting all of the features of a stock TCP stack, including security, agility, and generality. In particular, we remove code and data of less common cases from the fastpath, improving performance on the wide, deeply pipelined CPU architecture common in today's servers. To be workload proportional, TAS dynamically allocates the appropriate amount of CPUs to accommodate the fastpath, depending on the traffic load. TAS provides up to 90% higher throughput and 57% lower tail latency than the IX kernel bypass OS for common cloud applications, such as a key-value store and a realtime analytics framework. TAS also scales to more TCP connections, providing 2.2x higher throughput than IX with 64K connections. 

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