STYX: Exploiting SmartNIC Capability to Reduce Datacenter Memory Tax
summary
STYX RDMA-copies target memory regions to a SmartNIC (tested on a BlueField‑2), runs the heavy data-path work there, and RDMA-writes results back so the host only performs control decisions. It offloads compression and decompression and page-compare and hash work for zswap and KSM, cutting host CPU cycles and LLC pollution and yielding a reported 55–89% decrease in 99th‑percentile latency for co‑running latency-sensitive services while preserving the kernel features' benefits.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction to Stacks
- 0:59Memory optimization challenges
- 2:24Existing memory optimizations
- 5:05Impact of memory overhead
- 7:34SmartNIC capabilities
- 8:41The Stacks framework design
- 12:36Kernel implementation
- 13:38Evaluation and results
- 17:28Conclusion
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