HyperVDP: High-Performance Virtualization of the Programmable Data Plane
Cheng Zhang, Jun Bi, Yu Zhou, Jianping Wu · IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications · 2019
With the advent of P4-specific programmable data plane (PDP), network functions (NFs) can be offloaded into the PDP to achieve high performance guaranteed by hardware. Meanwhile, CPU powers consumed by NFs can be released to user applications. However, as more and more NFs can be offloaded, several problems rooted inside the PDP severely hinder it from facilitating this offloading trend. 1) The existing PDP provides the exclusive data plane abstraction where different NFs cannot operate the same data plane. 2) The PDP is hardly able to deploy NFs in a “hitless” manner. In this paper, we propose HyperVDP as a high-performance data plane hypervisor to provision non-exclusive abstraction and uninterrupted reconfigurability on the P4-specific PDP. To achieve virtualization, we design several innovative techniques to equally express functions of all programmable elements in the P4-specific PDP. We implement the prototype of HyperVDP on different target platforms, and evaluate different target-based prototypes by comparing with their counterparts. Results show that BMv2-target HyperVDP averagely prevails over its counterpart 2.5× in performance and 4× in resource efficiency. DPDK-target HyperVDP performs comparably to its counterparts while offering virtualization features which neither of its counterparts could provide.