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Speaker Name

/Affiliation: Sunay Tripathi Sun Microsystems

Date/Time: Thursday
March 8 2007 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.

coffee: 1:45 p.m.

Loc

ation: ACES 6.304

Talk Title: Virtualizable Architecture for High P

erformance Network Stack

Talk Abstract:
The Networking stack in

Solaris 10 uses a new architecture for doing network processing where the N

IC is controlled by the network and the transport layers creating a per CPU
vertical perimeter. The network stack is able to schedule the receive side
packet processing by dynamically controlling the rate of packet arrival fr

om individual receive rings on the NIC. The architecture minimizes context

switches and allows processing of packets without losing CPU affinity or co

ntending for any locks.

The network processing for a connection is p

erformed from a vertical perimeter which is implemented by a serialization
queue and consists of one or more threads bound to a CPU for better locali

ty.

There is at most one queuing and a packet once picked up for pr

ocessing is processed all the way to the socket layer on the inbound case

and all the way to the NIC on the outbound case without needing to contend

for additional locks or switch context.

The stack also provides the

building blocks for network virtualization and resource control by creating
virtual stacks around any service (HTTP HTTPS FTP NFS etc.) protocol

(TCP UDP SCTP etc.) or Virtual machines like Containers or Xen. Each vi

rtual stack can be assigned its own priority and band-width on a shared NIC
without causing any performance degradation.

The architecture dynam

ically manages priority and bandwidth resources and can provide better def

ense against denial-of-service attacks directed at a particular service or

virtual machine by isolating the impact just to that entity. The virtual st

acks are separated by means of H/W classification engine such that traffic

for one stack does not impact other virtual stacks.

Speaker Bio:
Sunay Tripathi is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems where he w

orks on the Solaris Core Operating Systems team.