ETD

• netmap
• networking
• virtual switching

Open vSwitch is a production quality multi-layer software switch that has many applications in the computing world and its network performance is a critical aspect. In this thesis I have extended Open vSwitch adding a new kind user-space port that uses netmap API.
Netmap is a framework for high speed packet I/O that can be used by user-space applications to achieve higher network performance compared to the standard operating system network stack.
I will show the implementation details and how it was designed to obtain a high performance. The system has been tested in different configurations comparing to existing solutions and reference implementations. Ovs has a comparable implementation that uses the DPDK framework, this is another API that similarly to Netmap bypasses the traditional network stack.
By using Netmap the virtual switch is able to match the performance of the DPDK implementation while having a better safety of operation, better compatibility with other operating systems and has a greater flexibility by enabling high performance on a virtual network interface controller used in container environments.