Question

Assuming I would like to avoid the overhead of the linux kernel in handling incoming packets and instead would like to grab the packet directly from user space. I have googled around a bit and it seems that all that needs to happen is one would use raw sockets with some socket options. Is this the case? Or is it more involved than this? And if so, what can I google for or reference in order to implement something like this?

Answer 1

There are many techniques for networking with kernel bypass.

First, if you are sending messages to another process on the same machine, you can do so through a shared memory region with no jumps into the kernel.

Passing packets over a network without involving the kernel gets more interesting, and involves specialized hardware that gets direct access to user memory. This idea is called RDMA.

Here’s one way it can work (this is what InfiniBand hardware does). The application registers a memory buffer with the RDMA hardware. This buffer is pinned in physical memory, since swapping it out would obviously be bad (since the hardware will keep writing to the physical memory region). A control region is also mapped into userspace memory. When an application is ready to use the buffer to send or receive a message, it writes a command to the control region. The hardware takes the data from a registered buffer on one end, and places it into another registered buffer at the other end.

Clearly, this is too low level, so there are abstractions that make programming RDMA hardware easier. OFED verbs are one such abstraction.

The InfiniBand software stack has one extra interesting bit: the Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) that is used for compatibility with existing applications. It works by inserting an LD_PRELOAD shim that translates standard socket API calls into IB verbs.

InfiniBand is just what I’m most familiar with. RoCE/iWARP hardware is very similar from the programmer’s perspective, but uses a different transport than InfiniBand (TCP using an offload engine in iWarp, Ethernet in RoCE). There are/were also other approaches to RDMA (Quadrics, for example).