Boosting the Forwarding Performance of Virtual Switches through Kernel-level Memory Optimization

Heungsik Choi, Kyoungwoon Lee, Chuck Yoo

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2018.45.6.511

A virtual switch enables network resources to be utilized by a wide range of virtual machines or containers. Many types of virtual switches have been developed to offer a variety of functions. However, due to the inefficient processing of existing virtual switches and the Linux networking stack, current high bandwidth requirements cannot be met. To solve this problem, various studies have been carried out to propose a method using a unique networking stack in a user-level rather than an existing kernel. However, various problems still exist such as reimplementation overhead, relatively low security, excessive memory usage, etc. This paper proposes kernel-level optimization techniques to improve network processing of the kernel networking stack as well as to overcome the limitations of existing techniques.