Towards μs tail latency and terabit ethernet: disaggregating the host network stack

Dedicated, tightly integrated, and static packet processing pipelines in today's most widely deployed network stacks preclude them from fully exploiting capabilities of modern hardware.

We present NetChannel, a disaggregated network stack architecture for µs-scale applications running atop Terabit Ethernet. NetChannel's disaggregated architecture enables independent scaling and scheduling of resources allocated to each layer in the packet processing pipeline. Using an end-to-end NetChannel realization within the Linux network stack, we demonstrate that NetChannel enables new operating points-(1) enabling a single application thread to saturate multi-hundred gigabit access link bandwidth; (2) enabling near-linear scalability for small message processing with number of cores, independent of number of application threads; and, (3) enabling isolation of latency-sensitive applications, allowing them to maintain µs-scale tail latency even when competing with throughput-bound applications operating at near-line rate.