It is possible to achieve huge performance improvements in the way packet processing is done on modern operating systems.
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Home → Magazine Archive → March 2012 (Vol. 55, No. 3) → Revisiting Network I/O APIs: The Netmap Framework → Abstract
Revisiting Network I/O APIs: The Netmap Framework
By Luigi Rizzo
Communications of the ACM,
Vol. 55 No. 3, Pages 45-51
10.1145/2093548.2093565
![[article image]](https://cacm.acm.org/system/assets/0000/7184/021612_Unmot_Revisiting-Network-IO1.large.jpg?1476779404&1329493278 "confetti")
2 Comments
Anonymous
I don't have first hand experience, but all published performance data on Virtio-net indicates speeds around 200Kpps per core even for small packet sizes. Without trying to dismiss the importance of Virtio for virtualization, the difference of two orders of magnitude with netmap performance suggests that virtio is not well suited to very high speed networking.
Adapting netmap to virtualized environments is one area we plan to explore in the future.
Luigi Rizzo
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Anonymous
Hi Luigi,
Excellent and timely article, thanks! Just wondering if you looked at Virtio (http://lwn.net/Articles/239238/) or can comment on its suitability as an optimized network I/O API?
Thank again, RobertW.