Onload can significantly reduce the costs associated with networking by reducing CPU overheads and improving performance for latency, bandwidth and application scalability.
Overhead
Transitioning into and out of the kernel from a user-space application is a relatively expensive operation: the equivalent of hundreds or thousands of instructions. With conventional networking such a transition is required every time the application sends and receives data. With Onload, the TCP/IP processing can be done entirely within the user-process, eliminating expensive application/kernel transitions through system calls. In addition, the Onload TCP/IP stack is highly tuned, offering further overhead savings.
The overhead savings of Onload mean more of the CPU's computing power is available to the application to do useful work.
Latency
Conventionally, when a server application is ready to process a transaction it calls into the OS kernel to perform a 'receive' operation, where the kernel puts the calling thread 'to sleep' until a request arrives from the network. When such a request arrives, the network hardware 'interrupts' the kernel, which receives the request and 'wakes' the application.
All of this overhead takes CPU cycles as well as increasing cache and translation lookaside-buffer (TLB) footprint. With Onload, the application can remain at user level waiting for requests to arrive at the network adapter and process them directly. The elimination of a kernel-to-user transition, an interrupt, and a subsequent user-to-kernel transition can significantly reduce latency. In short, reduced overheads mean reduced latency.
Bandwidth
Because Onload imposes less overhead, it can process more bytes of network traffic every second. Along with specially tuned buffering and algorithms designed for 10 gigabit networks, Onload allows applications to achieve significantly improved bandwidth.
Scalability
Modern multi-core systems are capable of running many applications simultaneously. However, the advantages can be quickly lost when the multiple cores contend on a single resource, such as locks in a kernel network stack or device driver. These problems are compounded on modern systems with multiple caches across many CPU cores and Non-Uniform Memory Architectures.
Onload results in the network adapter being partitioned and each partition being accessed by an independent copy of the TCP/IP stack. The result is that with Onload, doubling the cores really can result in doubled throughput as demonstrated by the following figure.
