Kairo - Incremental View Maintenance for Scalable Virtual Switch Caching
Annus Zulfiqar, Ben Pfaff, Gianni Antichi, Muhammad Mateen Shahbaz · 2025
Data centers manage complexity by offloading simple, high-speed packet forwarding to the network fabric and rely on virtual switches (vSwitches) at end hosts to enforce complex policies---managing connectivity across physical interfaces, containers, and VMs. Since their inception, vSwitches have seen major performance optimizations, including wildcard caches [14], learned-index lookups [15, 16], and high hit-rate SmartNIC offloads [24, 25]. Yet, fast vSwitch policy updates have remained largely overlooked, long considered non-critical to performance.