TCP Acceleration Service

TAS is a drop-in highly CPU efficient and scalable TCP acceleration service.

Our EuroSys2019 Paper describes the TAS design and its rationale.

Building

Requirements:

• TAS is built on top of Intel DPDK for direct access to the NIC. We have tested this version with dpdk-17.11.4

Assuming that dpdk is installed in ~/dpdk-inst TAS can be built as follows:

make RTE_SDK=~/dpdk-inst

This will build the TAS service (binary tas/tas), client libraries (in lib/), and a few debugging tools (in tools/).

Running

Before running TAS the following steps are necessary:

• Make sure hugetlbfs is mounted on /mnt/huge and enough huge pages are allocated for TAS and dpdk.
• Binding the NIC to the dpdk driver, as with any other dpdk application (for Intel NICs use vfio because uio does not support multiple interrupts).

sudo modprobe vfio-pci
sudo mount -t hugetlbfs nodev /mnt/huge
echo 1024 | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/node/node*/hugepages/hugepages-2048kB/nr_hugepages
sudo ~/dpdk-inst/sbin/dpdk-devbind  -b vfio-pci 0000:08:00.0

To run (--ip-addr and --fp-cores-max are the minimum arguments typically needed to run tas, for more see --help):

sudo code/tas/tas --ip-addr=10.0.0.1/24 --fp-cores-max=2

Once tas is running, applications that directly link to libtas or libtas_sockets can be run directly. To run an unmodified application with sockets interposition run as follows (for example):

sudo LD_PRELOAD=lib/libtas_interpose.so ../benchmarks/micro_rpc/echoserver_linux 1234 1 foo 8192 1

Code Structure

• tas/: service implementation
  • tas/fast: TAS fast path
  • tas/slow: TAS slow path
• lib/: client libraries
  • lib/tas: lowlevel TAS client library (interface: lib/tas/include/tas_ll.h)
  • lib/sockets: socket emulation layer
• tools/: debugging tools