LOS

Abstract

With the ever growing speed of Ethernet NIC and more and more CPU cores on commodity X86 servers, the processing capability of the network stack in Linux kernel has become the bottleneck. Recently there is a trend on moving the network stack up to user level and bypassing the kernel. However, most of these stacks require changing the APIs or modifying the source code of applications, and hence are difficult to support legacy applications. In this work, we design and develop LOS, a user-level network operating system that not only gains high throughput and low latency by kernel-bypass technologies but also achieves compatibility with legacy applications. We successfully run Nginx and NetPIPE on top of LOS without touching the source code, and the experimental results show that LOS achieves significant throughput and latency gains compared with Linux kernel.