SoftNIC: A Software NIC to Augment Hardware

As the main gateway for network traffic to a server, the network interface card (NIC) is an ideal place to incorporate diverse network functionality, such as traffic control, protocol offloading, and virtualization. However, the slow evolution and inherent inflexibility of NIC hardware have failed to support evolving protocols, emerging applications, and rapidly changing system/network architectures. The traditional software approach to this problem—implementing NIC features in the host network stack—is unable to meet increasingly challenging performance requirements. In this paper we present SoftNIC, a hybrid softwarehardware architecture to bridge the gap between limited hardware capabilities and ever changing user demands. SoftNIC provides a programmable platform that allows applications to leverage NIC features implemented in software and hardware, without sacrificing performance. Our evaluation results show that SoftNIC achieves multi-10G performance even on a single core and scales further with multiple cores. We also present a variety of use cases to show the potential of software NIC augmentation.