Abstract:
Software networking functions flexibly implement
packet processing, but performance is lacking compared to
purpose built hardware. To address this, commodity NICs execute
packet processing in hardware, improving performance, however
their fixed-function design restricts the features which can be
offloaded to hardware. One particular challenge is to implement
HQoS, which manages traffic by enforcing QoS requirements at
multiple levels, maintaining thousands of queues and applying
rate limits. In this work, we combine DPDK based user-space
packet processing with hardware offloaded packet processing on
commodity NICs, by integrating DPDK with Linux switchdev,
thus combining software flexibility and hardware acceleration.
We propose PMDlink, a side-channel API enabling direct hardware
control via DPDK’s PMD, exposing advanced packet
processing features without major driver modifications. Our
preliminary results highlight the benefits of hardware offloading
by showing the combined hardware-offloaded HQoS functions
and DPDK. Future work will refine PMDlink as a modular
interface, to better expose NIC capabilities to DPDK, and to
program more complex scheduling profiles.
