The Design and Implementation of IP Forwarding Fastpath on FreeBSD

Speaker: Nanako Momiyama

Abstract

In this talk, I will speak about a fast software packet routing architecture basing on the kernel packet forwarding plane. User-space packet forwarding has impressive performance, however, doing so in production has introduced some fundamental and engineering problems, such as isolation, scalability and API/CLI compatibility.

I therefore explore yet another approach to address these problems. Since our measurement results show that interactions between layer 2 and 3 are expensive at both input and output paths, I implemented new methods to conditionally bypass expensive code paths: quick protocol identification for input and destination MAC address caching within FIB for output. These methods increase the packet forwarding rate by a factor of three.

Biography

Nanako Momiyama is a first-year master student majoring in computer science at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. She received a bachelor’s degree from Keio University, where she began this work as her bachelor thesis, in Japan. Her main interests are networked and distributed systems.