Partition-Aware Packet Steering Using XDP and eBPF for Improving Application-Level Parallelism
Pekka Enberg, Ashwin Rao, Sasu Tarkoma · 2019
A single CPU core is not fast enough to process packets arriving from the network on commodity NICs. Applications are therefore turning to application-level partitioning and NIC offload to exploit parallelism on multicore systems and relieve the CPU. Although NIC offload techniques are not new, programmable NICs have emerged as a way for custom packet processing offload. However, it is not clear what parts of the application should be offloaded to a programmable NIC for improving parallelism.