MKPAC

Abstract

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has recently gained popularity due to its ability of offering high scalability and programmability using commodity servers and general-purpose operating system (OS). However, current OSes have failed to deliver the data-plane performance required by the software-based network functions, mainly due to the inherent overheads associated with network stack in the kernel. We present mKPAC, aimed at improving data plane performance of OS kernel in manycore environment. We analyze the high-impact overheads residing in network stack of Linux kernel, and show that the data plane performance for NFV can be accelerated by mitigating major performance penalties and by leveraging the availability of manycores. With 64 bytes packet size, mKPAC can successfully accelerate the Linux Kernel packet forwarding performance up to 40% in packets per second.