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VIRTIO-USER: a new versatile channel for kernel-bypass networks
Tan J., Liang C., Xie H., Xu Q., Hu J., Zhu H., Liu Y.  KBNets 2017 (Proceedings of the Workshop on Kernel-Bypass Networks, Los Angeles, CA, Aug 21, 2017)13-18.2017.Type:Proceedings
Date Reviewed: Sep 19 2018

VIRTIO-USER is a userspace-based channel to facilitate container applications to benefit from kernel-bypass technologies. The authors explain that container networking or operating system (OS) virtualization technologies have historically not been able to take advantage of kernel-bypass frameworks like DPDK and user-based virtual switch effectively. Hypervisor virtualization stacks rely on device emulation software layers like QEMU to separate front-end and back-end drivers for an efficient memory sharing model. Device emulation is not available for container-based OS virtualization deployments.

VIRTIO-USER introduces a new vhost adapter to emulate a VIRTIO device and bridge the front-end and back-end drivers. This adapter does need kernel support and uses VIRTIO specifications to facilitate talk between the vhost protocol and the vhost kernel module, and implements a VIRTIO ring-based memory sharing model.

VIRTIO-USER manages to perform significantly better than incumbent implementations such as a kernel network interface (KNI) or a poll mode driver (tap PMD), because it manages to avoid any segmentation of payloads up to 64 KB in size. Since it is able to egress or ingress big size payloads, it manages to use hardware offload features like transmission control protocol (TCP) segmentation offload (TSO) and large receive offload (LRO) more effectively. It also manages to boost performance by avoiding checksum computations. The authors claim VIRTIO-USER avoids user-kernel transitions more efficiently than other implementations, and establishes a framework for building container userspace stacks using the system.

Overall, the paper explains the advantages of VIRTIO-USER and manages to convince the reader to evaluate it for container-based virtual network function (VNF) acceleration. It solves a critical problem of network performance in OS virtualization-based containers with stringent packet performance requirements.

Typographical errors are observable; however, apart from some minor aberrations most profoundly observed in the conclusion section, most talking points are comprehensible.

Reviewer:  Shyamkumar Iyer Review #: CR146246 (1812-0635)
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