Rosebud: Making FPGA-Accelerated Middlebox Development More Pleasant

TL;DR

Rosebud is a framework that simplifies FPGA-accelerated middlebox development by decoupling hardware and software tasks, enabling easier debugging, reuse, and high-performance packet processing.

Contribution

It introduces a standardized interface linking hardware accelerators with packet processing pipelines, improving development efficiency and performance.

Findings

Supports ~200 Gbps traffic processing

Adds only 0.7-7 microseconds latency

Facilitates rapid development of FPGA-based middleboxes

Abstract

We introduce an approach to designing FPGA-accelerated middleboxes that simplifies development, debugging, and performance tuning by decoupling the tasks of hardware-accelerator implementation and software-application programming. Rosebud is a framework that links hardware accelerators to a high-performance packet processing pipeline through a standardized hardware/software interface. This separation of concerns allows hardware developers to focus on optimizing custom accelerators while freeing software programmers to reuse, configure, and debug accelerators in a fashion akin to software libraries. We show the benefits of the Rosebud framework by building a firewall based on a large blacklist and porting the Pigasus IDS pattern-matching accelerator in less than a month. Our experiments demonstrate that Rosebud delivers high performance, serving ~200 Gbps of traffic while adding only 0.7-7 microseconds of latency.