NetKernel: Making Network Stack Part of the Virtualized Infrastructure

Zhixiong Niu

doi:10.1109/TNET.2021.3129806

NetKernel: Making Network Stack Part of the Virtualized Infrastructure

2022-06-01

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DOI：10.1109/TNET.2021.3129806

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This paper presents a system called NetKernel that decouples the network stack from the guest virtual machine and offers it as an independent module. NetKernel represents a new paradigm where network stack can be managed as part of the virtualized infrastructure. It provides important efficiency benefits: By gaining control and visibility of the network stack, operators can perform network management more directly and flexibly, such as multiplexing VMs running different applications to the same network stack module to save CPU cores, and enforcing fair bandwidth sharing. Users also benefit from the simplified stack deployment and better performance: For example mTCP can be deployed without API change to support nginx natively, and shared memory networking can be readily enabled to improve performance of colocated VMs. Testbed evaluation using 100G NICs shows that NetKernel preserves the performance and scalability of both kernel and userspace network stacks, and provides the same isolation as the current architecture.

Keywords:

Cloud computing

Kernel

Containers

Sockets

Multiplexing

Virtual machine monitors

Throughput

Network stack

virtualization

VM

re-architecting

NetKernel: Making Network Stack Part of the Virtualized Infrastructure

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