Application of huge pages to the netmap platform

The netmap platform has been designed to support fast exchange of packets between user applications and the external world. Hardware of powerful servers can support multiple 10 Gb/s ports, but, the software cannot process shortest packets at such high throughputs even when it utilized the netmap platform. Such performance indicates that there is a room for improvements of the netmap platform. Translation of virtual memory addresses to physical memory addresses might be one of bottlenecks that slow down packet processing. This translation can be simplified and sped up by utilization of huge pages, as their number is smaller. In this paper, we will explore improvements that can be achieved by utilization of huge pages within the netmap based applications. We will demonstrate that the significant packet rate increase can be achieved by utilization of huge pages.