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The packer filter: an efficient mechanism for user-level network code

Authors:

M. AccettaAuthors Info & Claims

SOSP '87: Proceedings of the eleventh ACM Symposium on Operating systems principles

Pages 39 - 51

https://doi.org/10.1145/41457.37505

Published: 01 November 1987 Publication History

Abstract

Code to implement network protocols can be either inside the kernel of an operating system or in user-level processes. Kernel-resident code is hard to develop, debug, and maintain, but user-level implementations typically incur significant overhead and perform poorly.

The performance of user-level network code depends on the mechanism used to demultiplex received packets. Demultiplexing in a user-level process increases the rate of context switches and system calls, resulting in poor performance. Demultiplexing in the kernel eliminates unnecessary overhead.

This paper describes the packet filter, a kernel-resident, protocol-independent packet demultiplexer. Individual user processes have great flexibility in selecting which packets they will receive. Protocol implementations using the packet filter perform quite well, and have been in production use for several years.

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Index Terms

The packer filter: an efficient mechanism for user-level network code
1. Networks
  1. Network protocols
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Interpreters
    2. Context specific languages

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SOSP '87: Proceedings of the eleventh ACM Symposium on Operating systems principles

November 1987

162 pages

ISBN:089791242X

DOI:10.1145/41457

Chairman:
Les Belady

ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review Volume 21, Issue 5
Nov. 1987
162 pages
ISSN:0163-5980
DOI:10.1145/37499
Editor:
William M. Waite
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 1987 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 01 November 1987

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https://doi.org/10.1109/AICIT62434.2024.10730620
Abbadini MFacchinetti DOldani GRossi MParaboschi S(2023)NatiSand: Native Code Sandboxing for JavaScript RuntimesProceedings of the 26th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses10.1145/3607199.3607233(639-653)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3607199.3607233
Shen JZhang HXiang YShi XLi XShen YZhang ZWu YYin XWang JXu MLi YYin JSong JLi ZNie RSchulzrinne HKohler EMaltz DMisra V(2023)Network-Centric Distributed Tracing with DeepFlow: Troubleshooting Your Microservices in Zero CodeProceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2023 Conference10.1145/3603269.3604823(420-437)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3603269.3604823
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Asai H(2019)Deep Pipelining: Efficient Pipelining of Network Function Chains with Coroutines2019 IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft)10.1109/NETSOFT.2019.8806673(324-332)Online publication date: Jun-2019
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Reshetova EBonazzi FAsokan N(2017)Randomization Can’t Stop BPF JIT SprayNetwork and System Security10.1007/978-3-319-64701-2_17(233-247)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2017
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