Abstract

The conventional wisdom is that aggressive networking requirements, such as high packet rates for small mes-sages and microsecond-scale tail latency, are best ad-dressed outside the kernel, in a user-level networking stack. We present IX, a dataplane operating system that provides high I/O performance, while maintaining the key advantage of strong protection offered by existing ker-nels. IX uses hardware virtualization to separate man-agement and scheduling functions of the kernel (control plane) from network processing (dataplane). The data-plane architecture builds upon a native, zero-copy API and optimizes for both bandwidth and latency by dedi-cating hardware threads and networking queues to data-plane instances, processing bounded batches of packets to completion, and by eliminating coherence traffic and multi-core synchronization. We demonstrate that IX out-performs Linux and state-of-the-art, user-space network stacks significantly in both throughput and end-to-end la-tency. Moreover, IX improves the throughput of a widely deployed, key-value store by up to 3.6 × and reduces tail latency by more than 2×. 1