Santa: Faster Packet Delivery for Commonly Wished Replies

Abstract

Increasing network speeds challenge the packet processing performance of networked systems. This can mainly be attributed to processing overhead caused by the split between the kernel-space network stack and user-space applications. To mitigate this overhead, we propose Santa, an application agnostic kernel-level cache of frequent requests. By allowing user-space applications to offload frequent requests to the kernel-space, Santa offers drastic performance improvements and unlocks the speed of kernel-space networking for legacy server software without requiring extensive changes.