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 re-cent surge of network I/O performance has put enormous pressure on memory and software I/O processing sub-systems. Yet even at high speeds, flexibility in packet handling is still important for security, performance iso-lation, and virtualization. Thus, our proposal moves some of the packet process-ing traditionally done in software to the NIC DMA con-troller, where it can be done flexibly and at high speed. We show how FlexNIC can benefit widely used data cen-ter server applications, such as key-value stores.