• netmap
• framework
• fast
• access
• network
• devices

The increasing availability of low cost high speed network
adapters, leads to the possibility of creating high performance
network applications (software switches, traffic monitors and
generators, firewalls, etc.) with the utilization of commodity
hardware. However, in order to exploit the power of such
devices, we need to modify OS kernels and cast away all
operations which will potentially slow us down, because thought
for a general purpose usage. In this thesis we present
**netmap** a system that integrates the strengths of existing
proposals and addresses their weaknesses. First we implemented
an abstraction layer on top of network adapter kernel
structures. Then we exposed these wrappers to userspace by means
of memory mapping, so that programs could directly manipulate
packets at application level and synchronize with network
adapters only when needed. With **netmap** we were able to
saturate the link capacity on both 1 Gbit and 10 Gbit network
adapters; in our prototype, it takes only 90 CPU clock cycles to
move one packet between the wire and the application - about 10
times less than using the conventional APIs. This level of
efficiency is an enabling factor to the use of commodity
operating systems for a wide range of high performance network
applications.