Z-stack: A High-performance DPDK-based Zero-copy TCP/IP Protocol Stack

Data centers require high-performance and efficient networking for fast and reliable communication between applications. TCP/IP-based networking still plays a dominant role in data center networking to support a wide range of Layer-4 and Layer-7 applications, such as middleboxes and cloud-based microservices. However, traditional kernel-based TCP/IP stacks face performance challenges due to overheads such as context switching, interrupts, and copying. We present Z-stack, a high-performance userspace TCP/IP stack with a zero-copy design. Utilizing DPDK's Poll Mode Driver, Z-stack bypasses the kernel and moves packets between the NIC and the protocol stack in userspace, eliminating the overhead associated with kernel-based processing. Z-stack employs polling-based packet processing that improves performance under high loads, and eliminates receive livelocks compared to interrupt-driven packet processing. With its zero-copy socket design, Z-stack eliminates copies when moving data between the user application and the protocol stack, which further minimizes latency and improves throughput. In addition, Z-stack seamlessly integrates with shared memory processing within the node, eliminating duplicate protocol processing and serialization/deserialization overheads for intra-node communication. Z-stack uses F-stack as the starting point which integrates the proven TCP/IP stack from FreeBSD, providing a versatile solution for a variety of cloud use cases and improving performance of data center networking.