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Zero-Copy Receive for Virtualized Network Devices

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Book cover Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2018 (FTC 2018)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 881))

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Abstract

When receiving network traffic on guest VMs (virtual machines) running on the KVM hypervisor, data is copied from hypervisor buffers to guest buffers. This copy incurs CPU and latency overhead. It seems desirable to avoid this copy, if possible, and to use guest buffers directly to receive network data. A number of challenges must be overcome in order to accomplish this zero-copy receive, and some additional overhead is incurred in setting it up. We present the technical details on a zero-copy receive design and implementation and discuss the resulting performance degradation. In our implementation, the savings in CPU from avoiding the copy is overshadowed by the extra handling required for the smaller and often underutilized buffers .

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Acknowledgment

This work is part of the OPERA project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 688386 (OPERA) and 645402 (Mikelangelo).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IBM Research Labs - Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Kalman Meth, Joel Nider & Mike Rapoport

Authors
  1. Kalman Meth
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  2. Joel Nider
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  3. Mike Rapoport
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Joel Nider .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Saga University, Saga, Japan

    Kohei Arai

  2. The Science and Information (SAI) Organization, Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK

    Rahul Bhatia

  3. The Science and Information (SAI) Organization, Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK

    Supriya Kapoor

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© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Meth, K., Nider, J., Rapoport, M. (2019). Zero-Copy Receive for Virtualized Network Devices. In: Arai, K., Bhatia, R., Kapoor, S. (eds) Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2018. FTC 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 881. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02683-7_45

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