The Case for Writing Network Drivers in High-Level Programming Languages

TL;DR

This paper explores implementing network drivers in high-level languages like Rust, Go, and others, demonstrating safety benefits and analyzing performance trade-offs compared to traditional C drivers.

Contribution

It presents the first set of user space network drivers in multiple high-level languages and evaluates their safety and performance characteristics.

Findings

High-level language drivers are safer with fewer bugs.

Rust driver is only 4% slower than C despite more instructions.

Go's garbage collection maintains low latency under load.

Abstract

Drivers are written in C or restricted subsets of C++ on all production-grade server, desktop, and mobile operating systems. They account for 66% of the code in Linux, but 39 out of 40 security bugs related to memory safety found in Linux in 2017 are located in drivers. These bugs could have been prevented by using high-level languages for drivers. We present user space drivers for the Intel ixgbe 10 Gbit/s network cards implemented in Rust, Go, C#, Java, OCaml, Haskell, Swift, JavaScript, and Python written from scratch in idiomatic style for the respective languages. We quantify costs and benefits of using these languages: High-level languages are safer (fewer bugs, more safety checks), but run-time safety checks reduce throughput and garbage collection leads to latency spikes. Out-of-order CPUs mitigate the cost of safety checks: Our Rust driver executes 63% more instructions per packet but is only 4% slower than a reference C implementation. Go's garbage collector keeps latencies below 100 $\mu$s even under heavy load. Other languages fare worse, but their unique properties make for an interesting case study. All implementations are available as free and open source at https://github.com/ixy-languages/ixy-languages.