Title: SoftNIC: A Software NIC to Augment Hardware

Abstract:
As the main gateway for network traffic to a server, the network interface card (NIC) is an ideal place to incorporate various network functionalities, such as traffic control, protocol offloading, and virtualization. However, the slow evolution and inherent inflexibility of NIC hardware have failed to support evolving protocols, diverging applications, and rapidly changing systems/network architectures. The traditional software approach to this problem -- implementing NIC features in the host network stack -- is not able to meet the challenging performance requirements for datacenter workloads. We present SoftNIC, a hybrid software-hardware approach to fill the gap between limited hardware capabilities and ever changing user demands. SoftNIC implements sophisticated NIC features in software on dedicated processor cores while leveraging the underlying hardware NICs. Our evaluation results show that SoftNIC achieves multi-10G performance even on a single core and scales well for upcoming 40G/100G links. We also present a variety of use cases to show that the flexibility of SoftNIC provides further benefits.