NetPopcorn #
Some OS subsystems may suffer performance scalability more than others. This is the case, for example, with the Linux network stack. With increasingly fast network cards, any network stack cross-CPU synchronization may hinder packet processing latency – fundamental in the data-center (cf. tail latency) or in telecommunication and network appliances. NetPopcorn extends the replicated-kernel OS model of Popcorn Linux with a distributed network stack implementation and a distributed device driver model (Snap Bean). NetPopcorn shows better performance than Linux and state-of-the-art research efforts on Linux, as well as nearing the same performance as kernel-bypass solutions (cf. DPDK).
You can find more information about NetPopcorn in the following paper and Virginia Tech thesis:
- A Distributed Operating System Network Stack and Device Driver for Multicores, B. M. Saif Ansary, Antonio Barbalace, Binoy Ravindran, Thomas Lazor, and Ho-Ren Chuang, The 37th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2017), Short paper, June 5-8, 2017, Atlanta, Georgia, USA
- B.M. Saif Ansary, “ High Performance Inter-kernel Communication and Networking in a Replicated-kernel Operating System”, September 2015
Source code and documentation is available online on sourceforge.
Contact: Binoy Ravindran, Virginia Tech: binoy@vt.edu #
This is an open-source project of the Systems Software Research Group at Virginia Tech.
This work was supported in part by ONR under grants N00014- 13-1-0317 and N00014-16-1-2711, AFOSR under grant FA9550- 14-1-0163, and NAVSEA/NEEC under grants 3003279297 and N00174-16-C-0018. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this site are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of ONR, AFOSR, and NAVSEA/NEEC.