Application-Agnostic Offloading of Datagram Processing

As network speed increases, servers struggle to serve all requests directed at them. This challenge is rooted in a partitioned data path where the split between the kernel space networking stack and user space applications induces overheads. To address this challenge, we propose Santa, an architecture to optimize the data path by enabling server applications to (partially) offload packet processing to a generic rule processor. We exemplify Santa by showing how it can drastically accelerate UDP packet processing in the Linux kernel—a currently neglected domain. Our evaluation focuses on accelerating DNS traffic for which we find a performance increase by a factor of 5.5 on real-world request pattern.