mSwitch: A Highly-Scalable, Modular Software Switch

In recent years software network switches have regained eminence as a result of a number of growing trends, including the prominence of software-defined networks, as well as their use as back-ends to virtualization technologies, to name a few. Consequently, a number of high performance switches have been recently proposed in the literature, though none of these simultaneously provide (1) high packet rates, (2) high throughput, (3) low CPU usage, (4) high port density and (5) a flexible data plane. This is not by chance: these features conflict, and while achieving one or a few of them is (now) a solved problem, addressing the combination requires significant new design effort.

In this paper we fill the gap by presenting mSwitch. To prove the flexibility and performance of our approach, we use mSwitch to build four distinct modules: a learning bridge consisting of 45 lines of code that outperforms FreeBSD's bridge by up to 8 times; an accelerated Open vSwitch module requiring small changes to the code and boosting performance by 2.6-3 times; a protocol demultiplexer for userspace protocol stacks; and a filtering module that can direct packets to virtualized middleboxes.