StackMap: Low-Latency Networking with the OS Stack and Dedicated NICs

2016 USENIX Annual Technical Conference Denver, CO 

StackMap leverages the best aspects of kernel-bypass networking into a new low-latency OS network service based on the full-featured TCP kernel implementation, by dedicating network interfaces to applications and offering an extended version of the netmap API for zero-copy, low-overhead data path alongside control path based on socket API. For small-message, transactional workloads, StackMap outperforms baseline Linux by 4 to 78 % in latency and 42 to 133 % in throughput. It also achieves comparable performance with Seastar, a highly-optimized user-level TCP/IP stack that runs on top of DPDK.

Resources

The definitive version of the paper can be found at: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc16/atc16-paper_yasukata.pdf. 

The slides presented at the conference can be found at: https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/conference/protected-files/atc16_slides_yasukata.pdf