G igaflow : Pipeline-Aware Sub-Traversal Caching for Modern SmartNICs
Annus Zulfiqar, Ali Imran, Venkat Kunaparaju, Ben Pfaff, Gianni Antichi, Muhammad Mateen Shahbaz · 2025
The success of modern public/edge clouds hinges heavily on the performance of their end-host network stacks if they are to support the emerging and diverse tenants' workloads (e.g., distributed training in the cloud to fast inference at the edge). Virtual Switches (vSwitches) are vital components of this stack, providing a unified interface to enforce high-level policies on incoming packets and route them to physical interfaces, containers, or virtual machines. As performance demands escalate, there has been a shift toward offloading vSwitch processing to SmartNICs to alleviate CPU load and improve efficiency. However, existing solutions struggle to handle the growing flow rule space within the NIC, leading to high miss rates and poor scalability.