Revisiting User-Level Networking
20 October 2011
User-level networking has been applied mostly in the area of high-performance computing since it allows applications to obtain maximum performance from the hardware. We argue that running network protocol stacks in the user space also allows applications to reduce the amount of state that the operating system kernel maintains on their behalf enabling much greater application elasticity and mobility. We describe a lightweight user-level networking framework that does not require any modication to existing networking hardware nor protocols. The main advantages of our framework are its simplicity and ease of implementation.