CPU affinity with ULE scheduler

[Archimedes Gaviola]

> In both cases the code path a packet must go through is very similar: it
> has to be received, then processed through firewalls and network stack
> code, then delivered to application(s), so it's a serial process. There
> are things that could be better parallelized in the stack and people are
> working on them, but they will not be finished any time soon.


Ah okay so the project is moving towards network stack parallelism.
What is the benefit of parallelized network stack in comparison to the
current serialized network stack? Is there any known issues with
serialized network stack dealing with multiple CPUs? If it has, in
what aspect, components or subsystem of the operating system? With
network stack parallelism, what are the necessary changes of the
operating system? How should be the network processing be optimized
with parallelized network stack? I have gone through a technical paper
in the Internet about evaluation on network stack parallelism
strategies for modern operating system
http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/Architecture/docs/willmann-usenix06.pdf
which described about approaches in implementing parallelized network
stack in which also described FreeBSD were used as the prototype of
the different approaches, from here I want to know what approach does
FreeBSD is implementing, is it message-based parallelism or
connection-based parallelism?

Thanks,
Archimedes