Software data planes running on commodity servers are very popular in real deployments. However, to attain top class performance, the software approach requires the adoption of accelerated network I/O frameworks, each of them characterized by its own programming model and API. As a result, network applications are often closely tied to the underlying technology, with obvious issues of portability over different systems. This is especially true in cloud scenarios where different I/O frameworks could be installed depending on the configuration of the physical servers in the infrastructure. The nethuns library proposes a unified programming abstraction to access and manage network operations over different I/O frameworks. The library is freely available to the community under the BSD license and currently supports AF_XDP and netmap for fast packet handling along with the classic AF_PACKET and the pcap library. Network applications based on nethuns need only to be re-compiled to run over a different network API. The experiments prove that the overhead introduced by nethuns is negligible, hence making it a convenient programming platform that eases the coding process while guaranteeing high performance and portability. As proofs of concept, a handy traffic generator as well as the popular Open vSwitch application have been successfully ported and tested over nethuns.

Programming socket-independent network functions with nethuns

Bonelli N.;Del Vigna F.;Fais A.;Lettieri G.;Procissi G.
2022-01-01

Abstract

Software data planes running on commodity servers are very popular in real deployments. However, to attain top class performance, the software approach requires the adoption of accelerated network I/O frameworks, each of them characterized by its own programming model and API. As a result, network applications are often closely tied to the underlying technology, with obvious issues of portability over different systems. This is especially true in cloud scenarios where different I/O frameworks could be installed depending on the configuration of the physical servers in the infrastructure. The nethuns library proposes a unified programming abstraction to access and manage network operations over different I/O frameworks. The library is freely available to the community under the BSD license and currently supports AF_XDP and netmap for fast packet handling along with the classic AF_PACKET and the pcap library. Network applications based on nethuns need only to be re-compiled to run over a different network API. The experiments prove that the overhead introduced by nethuns is negligible, hence making it a convenient programming platform that eases the coding process while guaranteeing high performance and portability. As proofs of concept, a handy traffic generator as well as the popular Open vSwitch application have been successfully ported and tested over nethuns.
2022
Bonelli, N.; Del Vigna, F.; Fais, A.; Lettieri, G.; Procissi, G.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11568/1160939
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