Understanding host network stack overheads
Qizhe Cai, Shubham Chaudhary, Midhul Vuppalapati, Jaehyun Hwang, Rachit Agarwal · 2021
Traditional end-host network stacks are struggling to keep up with rapidly increasing datacenter access link bandwidths due to their unsustainable CPU overheads. Motivated by this, our community is exploring a multitude of solutions for future network stacks: from Linux kernel optimizations to partial hardware offload to clean-slate userspace stacks to specialized host network hardware. The design space explored by these solutions would benefit from a detailed understanding of CPU inefficiencies in existing network stacks.