Network Policy Manager (Proof of concept)

Users want out-of-the-box high performance networking on their new multi-core Intel servers with multi-queue enabled Network Interface Adapters. Unfortunately, network specific system tuning is so hard that most system administrators can’t achieve the benchmarks scores that we advertise, without navigating a manually intensive and error prone process. Additionally, fully automatic tuning for all workloads is a difficult if not impossible task. The goal of the Network Policy Manager proof of concept is to simplify the tuning by using a simple policy specification (arbitrated by the kernel) that can achieve better network performance than out of the box. We show the state of our current proof of concept, compare some initial results against “out of the box”, and summarize our ideas and direction in order to get further comment.

Affected areas include network drivers, ethtool interface and control, irq affinity, scheduler, multi-queue network core.

Owners: Jesse Brandeburg and Andi Kleen

BIO: Jesse Brandeburg is a senior Linux developer in the Intel LAN Access Division, producing the Intel Wired Ethernet product lines. Jesse has been with Intel since 1994, and has worked on the Linux e100, e1000, e1000e, igb, ixgb, ixgbe drivers since 2002. Jesse splits his time between solving customer issues, performance tuning Intel's drivers, and working on bleeding edge development for the Linux networking stack.