HAVS: Hardware-accelerated Shared-memory-based VPP Network Stack

Abstract

The number of requests to transfer large files is increasing rapidly in web server and remote-storage scenarios, and this increase requires a higher processing capacity from the network stack. However, to fully decouple from applications, many latest userspace network stacks, such as VPP (vector packet processing) and snap, adopt a shared-memory-based solution to communicate with upper applications. During this communication, the application or network stack needs to copy data to or from shared memory queues. In our verification experiment, these multiple copy operations incur more than 50% CPU consumption and severe performance degradation when the transferred file is larger than 32 KB. This paper adopts a hardware-accelerated solution and proposes HAVS which integrates Intel I/O Acceleration Technology into the VPP network stack to achieve high-performance memory copy offloading. An asynchronous copy architecture is introduced in HAVS to free up CPU resources. Moreover, an abstract memcpy accelerator layer is constructed in HAVS to ease the use of different types of hardware accelerators and sustain high availability with a fault-tolerance mechanism. The comprehensive evaluation shows that HAVS can provide an average 50%-60% throughput improvement over the original VPP stack when accelerating the nginx and SPDK iSCSI target application.