Rethinking Network Stack Design with Memory Snapshots

Hardware virtualization is a core operating system feature. Network devices, in particular, must be shared while providing high I/O performance. By redesigning the network stack on a novel memory system that supports snapshot isolation, the operating system can effectively share network resources through the familiar socket API, enable zero-copy, reduce memory allocations and simplify driver communication with network interface cards. Starting with network I/O, we hope to further the discussion on hardware-software co-design to improve operating system architecture.