Pegasus: Transparent and Unified Kernel-Bypass Networking for Fast Local and Remote Communication

Modern software architectures in cloud computing are highly reliant on interconnected local and remote services. Popular architectures, such as the service mesh, rely on the use of independent services or sidecars for a single application. While such modular approaches simplify application development and deployment, they also introduce significant communication overhead since now even local communication that is handled by the kernel becomes a performance bottleneck. This problem has been identified and partially solved for remote communication over fast NICs through the use of kernel-bypass data plane systems. However, existing kernelbypass mechanisms challenge their practical deployment by either requiring code modification or supporting only a small subset of the network interface.

In this paper, we propose Pegasus, a framework for transparent kernel bypass for local and remote communication. By transparently fusing multiple applications into a single process, Pegasus provides an in-process fast path to bypass the kernel for local communication. To accelerate remote communication over fast NICs, Pegasus uses DPDK to directly access the NIC. Pegasus supports transparent kernel bypass for unmodified binaries by implementing core OS services in user space, such as scheduling and memory management, thus removing the kernel from the critical path. Our experiments on a range of real-world applications show that, compared with Linux, Pegasus improves the throughput by 19% to 33% for local communication and 178% to 442% for remote communication, without application changes. Furthermore, Pegasus achieves 222% higher throughput than Linux for co-located, IO-intensive applications that require