TAS: TCP Acceleration as an OS Service
As datacenter network speeds rise, an increasing fraction of server CPU cycles is consumed by TCP packet processing, in particular for remote procedure calls (RPCs). To free server CPUs from this burden, various existing approaches have attempted to mitigate these overheads, by bypassing the OS kernel, customizing the TCP stack for an application, or by offloading packet processing to dedicated hardware. In doing so, these approaches trade security, agility, or generality for efficiency. Neither trade-off is fully desirable in the fast-evolving commodity cloud.