A Survey of Kernel-Bypass Techniques in Network Stack
Ruining Chen, Guoao Sun · Proceedings of the 2018 2nd International Conference on Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence · 2018
With the rapid development of network interface controller (NIC), network stack has become the determinant of web service performance. Traditionally, network stack is implemented in the kernel. However, kernel network stack has its inefficiencies and there is a basic mismatch between fast hardware and slow software. Bypassing the kernel and implementing the network stack in user-space have become a hot topic in both academic and industry research areas. In this paper, we study the existing kernel-bypass techniques and provides a comprehensive survey of user-space network stack. Our primary attention is to propose a research overview of the state-of-the-art user-space network stack design and provide critical guidance on the design of next-generation network stack.