Title: The Demikernel Datapath Architecture for Microsecond-scale
Datacenter Systems

Abstract:

Datacenter systems and I/O devices now run at single-digit microsecond
latencies, requiring nanosecond-scale operating systems. Traditional
kernel-based operating systems impose an unaffordable overhead, so
recent kernel-bypass OSes (e.g., Arrakis, Ix) and libraries (e.g.,
Caladan, eRPC) eliminate the OS kernel from the I/O datapath. However,
these systems do not offer a general-purpose datapath OS replacement
that meet the needs of microsecond-scale systems.  As a result, while
kernel-bypass hardware is widely available in the datacenter, it is
not widely used.

This talk summarizes Demikernel, a flexible datapath OS and architecture
designed for heterogenous kernel-bypass devices and microsecond-scale
datacenter systems. Demikernel supports a variety of kernel-bypass
hardware, including DPDK, RDMA, as well as software bypass solutions
like io_uring. To support microsecond-scale operation, Demikernel
includes a new nanosecond-scale TCP stack, written in Rust and
proposes new memory management, CPU scheduling and network
abstractions. Demikernel is currently used by Bing and will go into
production with Azure services later this year.