Kernel-bypass networking is gaining popularity. This means moving control of Ethernet hardware directly into userspace processes to avoid the overhead of communicating with the operating system kernel. This gives userspace all of the raw performance traditionally enjoyed by the kernel – and all of the responsibility too. This is important for certain specialized applications that can gain as much as 20x more performance.
Here is a selection of the many kernel-bypass solutions that are available:
- ntop.org DNA.
- netmap.
- Intel DPDK.
- Myricom Sniffer10G and DBL.
- 6WINDGate.
- SolarFlare OpenOnload.
- Napatech.
These products each take their own design approaches and it’s interesting to consider choices that they make.
- Customized kernel device driver. netmap and DNA both fork standard Intel drivers with extensions to map I/O memory into userspace.
- Custom hardware. Myricom and Napatech both distribute bespoke device drivers for their own custom hardware (ASIC for Myricom and FPGA for Napatech).
- Userspace library. These solutions each provide unique libraries to access their extensions. The scope varies tremendously: Ethernet I/O, libpcap compatibility, hardware-assisted traffic dispatching for multiprocessing, buffer memory management, all the way up to entire TCP/IP socket layers.
- Licensing. netmap is open-source, DNA requires a modest license for its userspace library, Napatech requires an NDA and depends on very expensive hardware.
If you are developing high-speed (10+ Gbps) networking applications then you should seriously consider using one of these solutions. If you are an expert on one of these solutions then please tell us about it on the Snabb Switch Reddit!