FreeFlow: Software-based Virtual RDMA Networking for Containerized Clouds
summary
FreeFlow implements a software RDMA virtualization layer that runs on commodity RDMA NICs, intercepting libibverbs’ serialized commands and presenting shadow memory to the NICs via a user‑space router and modified verbs library. Implementation uses Docker, real RDMA NICs and a C++ router prototype that runs on one CPU core. Evaluation shows +0.4µs latency vs native RDMA, full throughput for ≥1KB messages, throughput drops for tiny messages, and 8.7× speedup vs container TCP on TensorFlow, matching nearly native performance while preserving namespace isolation and container IP portability.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:24Two Trends in Cloud Applications
- 1:21Benefits of Containerization
- 2:04Containerization and RDMA are in Conflict!
- 3:00Existing H/W based Virtualization isn't Working
- 4:09Sub-optimal Performance of Containerized Apps
- 4:50Our Work: FreeFlow
- 5:43FreeFlow Design Overview Native RDMA
- 6:37Background on RDMA
- 7:39FreeFlow in the Scene
- 8:56Challenge 1: Verbs forwarding in Control Path
- 10:31Internal Structure of Verbs Library
- 11:03FreeFlow Control Path Channel
- 11:49Challenge 2: Synchronizing Memory for Data Path
- 12:31Strawman Approach for Synchronization
- 14:29Zero-copy Synchronization in Data Path
- 15:51FreeFlow Design Summary
- 16:44Implementation and Experimental Setup
- 17:05Does FreeFlow Support Low Latency?
- 24:41Does FreeFlow Support High Throughput?
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