PacketMill: Toward per-Core 100-Gbps networking

Abstract

We present PacketMill, a system for optimizing software packet processing, which (i) introduces a new model to efficiently manage packet metadata and (ii) employs code-optimization techniques to better utilize commodity hardware. PacketMill grinds the whole packet processing stack, from the high-level network function configuration file to the low-level userspace network (specifically DPDK) drivers, to mitigate inefficiencies and produce a customized binary for a given network function. Our evaluation results show that PacketMill increases throughput (up to 36.4 Gbps-70%) and reduces latency (up to 101 us-28%) and enables nontrivial packet processing (e.g., router) at ~100 Gbps, when new packets arrive >10× faster than main memory access times, while using only one processing core.