In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of high speed packet I/O frameworks, bringing unprecedented network performance to userspace. Using the Click modular router, we first review and quantitatively compare several such packet I/O frameworks, showing their superiority to kernel-based forwarding.We then reconsider the issue of software packet processing, in the context of modern commodity hardware with hardware multi-queues, multi-core processors and non-uniform memory access. Through a combination of existing techniques and improvements of our own, we derive modern general principles for the design of software packet processors.Our implementation of a fast packet processor framework, integrating a faster Click with both Netmap and DPDK, exhibits up-to about 2.3x speed-up compared to other software implementations, when used as an IP router.

Abstract

To cope with the growing performance needs of appliances in datacenters or the network edge, current middlebox functionalities such as firewalls, NAT, DPI, content-aware optimizers or load-balancers are often implemented on multiple (perhaps virtual) machines.In this work, we design a system able to run a pipeline of VNFs with a high level of parallelism to handle many flows. We provide the user facilities to define the traffic class of interest for the VNF, a definition of session to group the packets such as the TCP 4-tuples, and the amount of space per sessions. The system will then synthesize the classification and build a unique, efficient flow table. We build an abstract view of flows and use it to implement support for seamless inspection and modification of the content of any flow (such as TCP or HTTP), automatically reflecting a consistent view, across layers, of flows modified onthe-fly.Our prototype gives rise to a user-space software NFV dataplane enabling easy implementation of middlebox functionalities, as well as the deployment of complex scenarios. Our prototype implementation is able to handle our testbed limit of ~34 Gbps of HTTP requests (for 8-KB files) through a service chain of multiples stateful VNFs, on a single Xeon core.

Unikernels are famous for providing excellent performance in terms of boot times, throughput and memory consumption, to name a few metrics. However, they are infamous for making it hard and extremely time consuming to extract such performance, and for needing significant engineering effort in order to port applications to them. We introduce Unikraft, a novel micro-library OS that (1) fully modularizes OS primitives so that it is easy to customize the unikernel and include only relevant components and (2) exposes a set of composable, performance-oriented APIs in order to make it easy for developers to obtain high performance.Our evaluation using off-the-shelf applications such as nginx, SQLite, and Redis shows that running them on Unikraft results in a 1.7x-2.7x performance improvement compared to Linux guests. In addition, Unikraft images for these apps are around 1MB, require less than 10MB of RAM to run, and boot in around 1ms on top of the VMM time (total boot time 3ms-40ms). Unikraft is a Linux Foundation open source project and can be found at www.unikraft.org.

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