Bringing Reconfigurability to the Network Stack

Abstract

Reconfiguring the network stack allows applications to specialize the implementations of communication libraries depending on where they run, the requests they serve, and the performance they need to provide. Specializing applications in this way is challenging because developers need to choose the libraries they use when writing a program and cannot easily change them at runtime. This paper introduces Bertha, which allows these choices to be changed at runtime without limiting developer flexibility in the choice of network and communication functions. Bertha allows applications to safely use optimized communication primitives (including ones with deployment limitations) without limiting deployability. Our evaluation shows cases where this results in 16x higher throughput and 63% lower latency than current portable approaches while imposing minimal overheads when compared to a hand-optimized versions that use deployment-specific communication primitives.