FlexNIC: Rethinking Network DMA

We propose FlexNIC, a flexible network DMA interface that can be used by operating systems and applications alike to reduce packet processing overheads. The recent surge of network I/O performance has put enormous pressure on memory and software I/O processing subsystems. Yet even at high speeds, flexibility in packet handling is still important for security, performance isolation, and virtualization. Thus, our proposal moves some of the packet processing traditionally done in software to the NIC DMA controller, where it can be done flexibly and at high speed. We show how FlexNIC can benefit widely used data center server applications, such as key-value stores.