Abstract
This paper presents an extension to a software framework designed to evaluate the efficiency of different software and hardware-accelerated virtual switches, each commonly adopted on Linux to provide virtual network connectivity to containers in high-performance scenarios, like in Network Function Virtualization (NFV). We present results from the use of our tools, showing the performance of multiple high-performance networking frameworks on a specific platform, comparing the collected data for various key metrics, namely throughput, latency and scalability, with respect to the required computational power.
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Notes
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OS containers in Linux achieve isolation employing cgroups and namespaces. With these tools, virtual Ethernet ports assigned to a container will no longer be visible or accessible outside the assigned cgroup/namespace, but it will still be part of the host network stack. In this sense, OS containers do not introduce any overhead when encapsulated applications exchange packets over the virtual network.
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However, data copies across multiple processes are still required for security reasons, especially when interacting components do not trust each other, like VNFs.
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The Basic Forwarding Sample Application does not implement any switching logic, while Snabb was not compatible with our selected SR-IOV Ethernet controller.
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This limitation corresponds to the processing power reserved for each worker thread they spawn for software virtual switches, while for SR-IOV devices, it is an intrinsic characteristic of their hardware implementation.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank professor Giuseppe Lettieri from the University of Pisa for the timely help provided during the integration of Netmap in the framework.
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Ara, G., Lai, L., Cucinotta, T., Abeni, L., Vitucci, C. (2021). A Framework for Comparative Evaluation of High-Performance Virtualized Networking Mechanisms. In: Ferguson, D., Pahl, C., Helfert, M. (eds) Cloud Computing and Services Science. CLOSER 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1399. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72369-9_3
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