BESS

Berkeley Extensible Software Switch

  • Modern NICs implement various features in hardware, such as protocol offloading, multicore supports, traffic control, and self virtualization. This approach exposes several issues: protocol dependence, limited hardware resources, and incomplete/buggy/non-compliant implementation. Even worse, the slow evolution of hardware NICs due to increasingly overwhelming design complexity cannot keep up in time with the new protocols and rapidly changing network architectures. We introduce the SoftNIC architecture to fill the gap between hardware capabilities and user demands. Our current SoftNIC prototype implements sophisticated NIC features on a few dedicated processor cores, while assuming only streamlined functionalities in hardware. The preliminary evaluation results show that most NIC features can be implemented in software with minimum performance cost, while the flexibility of software provides further potential benefits.

    Read the Paper See the Code

  • Architecture

    BESS represents a packet processing pipeline as a dataflow (multi)graph that consists of modules, each of which implements a NIC feature. Ports act as sources and sinks for this pipeline. Packets received at a port flow through the pipeline to another port. Each module in the pipeline performs module-specific operations on packets. Our dataflow approach is heavily inspired by the Click modular router, although we both simplify and extend Click’s design choices

    Multi-Core Scalability

    BESS provides two means to scale the packet processing pipeline. The default scheme is duplication, each core runs the identical pipeline of modules in parallel. The other scheme is chaining, where the pipeline is partitioned with in-memory queue connection.

    BESS sustains enough throughput on a single core to support high-speed links and scales well to multiple cores.

  • Publications and Code

  • Collaborators

    • Sangjin Han
    • Keon Jang
    • Dongsu Han
    • Aurojit Panda
    • Saikrishna Edupuganti
    • Joshua Reich
    • Sylvia Ratnasamy