NSDI '21 - Programming Network Stack for Middleboxes with Rubik

NSDI '21 - Programming Network Stack for Middleboxes with Rubik

Hao Li, Xi'an Jiaotong University; Changhao Wu, Xi'an Jiaotong University and Brown University; Guangda Sun, Peng Zhang, and Danfeng Shan, Xi'an Jiaotong University; Tian Pan, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications; Chengchen Hu, Xilinx Labs Asia Pacific

Middleboxes are becoming indispensable in modern networks. However, programming the network stack of middleboxes to support emerging transport protocols and flexible stack hierarchy is still a daunting task. To this end, we propose Rubik, a language that greatly facilitates the task of middlebox stack programming. Different from existing hand-written approaches, Rubik offers various high-level constructs for relieving the operators from dealing with massive native code, so that they can focus on specifying their processing intents. We show that using Rubik one can program the middlebox stack with minor efforts, e.g., 250 lines of code for a complete TCP/IP stack, which is a reduction of 2 orders of magnitude compared to the hand-written versions. To maintain high performance, we conduct extensive optimizations at the middle- and back-end of the compiler. Experiments show that the stacks generated by Rubik outperform the mature hand-written stacks by at least 30% in throughput.

View the full NSDI '21 program at https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi21/technical-sessions