# NetKernel: Making Network Stack Part of the Virtualized Infrastructure

## TL;DR

NetKernel introduces a novel approach by decoupling the network stack from virtual machines, enabling more flexible management, improved performance, and better resource utilization in virtualized environments.

## Contribution

It presents a new system that makes the network stack an independent module within virtualized infrastructure, enhancing flexibility and efficiency.

## Key findings

- Preserves performance and scalability of network stacks
- Enables flexible network management and resource sharing
- Maintains isolation comparable to traditional architectures

## Abstract

This paper presents a system called NetKernel that decouples the network stack from the guest virtual machine and offers it as an independent module. NetKernel represents a new paradigm where network stack can be managed as part of the virtualized infrastructure. It provides important efficiency benefits: By gaining control and visibility of the network stack, operator can perform network management more directly and flexibly, such as multiplexing VMs running different applications to the same network stack module to save CPU cores, and enforcing fair bandwidth sharing with distributed congestion control. Users also benefit from the simplified stack deployment and better performance. For example mTCP can be deployed without API change to support nginx natively, and shared memory networking can be readily enabled to improve performance of colocated VMs. Testbed evaluation using 100G NICs shows that NetKernel preserves the performance and scalability of both kernel and userspace network stacks, and provides the same isolation as the current architecture.