A port-configuration assisted NIC IRQ affinitization scheme for multi-core packet forwarding applications

Abstract

Interrupt affinitization of network interface cards (NICs) is a fundamental composition that defines how packets are processed by which CPU-cores on multi-core platforms. In this paper, we propose a simple port-configuration assisted scheme to attain an optimal affinitization for packet forwarding applications. Experiments ranging from bridging, routing, flow tracking to deep packet inspection are conducted to show the performance impacts utilizing different affinitization approaches. As a result, our proposed scheme achieves the same performance level as the best fixed affinitization scheme. In addition, the effectiveness of interrupt balancing is demonstrated for our scheme to be superior to the widely-deployed irqbalance with varying network settings.