Metronome: adaptive packet retrieval in DPDK

Welcome to the official Metronome repository: Metronome enables CPU usage proportional to the incoming load in DPDK, as well as flexible sharing of CPU resources between I/O tasks and applications. Here are some pointers to deep into our work:

• Our CoNEXT paper is available here.
• An extension of this work, comprehensive of a multiqueue orchestration algorithm and tests on 40Gbps NICs is available on arXiv.
• We also have a video of the CoNEXT presentation.

We encourage you to clone Metronome and try it on your Linux machine. You can contact us using our Slack channel for any questions or trouble in using Metronome.

If you are looking for the CoNEXT artifacts evaluation, please switch to the artifacts branch.

The repository is organized with two main directories:

• hr_sleep: contains the kernel module to load the hr_sleep patch and a basic test to verify its correct working and the performance differences compared to Linux' nanosleep().
• tests: contains the tests explained in Section 5.5 of the paper. We encourage reviewers to use the l3fwd experiment as it is the one used for the paper evaluation.

  Prerequisites

  Below is a description of the different testbeds on which we tested Metronome. We do not guarantee Metronome will work smoothly with any different configuration

• CPU: Intel x86
• Kernel: Linux kernel from 3.2 to 5.8
• NICs: Intel X520, X710, XL710

Software requisites:

• DPDK: version 19.11

Testbed setup

Loading the hr_sleep module

Switch to the hr_sleep directory if you're interested in mounting our hr_sleep sleep service and follow the instructions in the directory's README file. This is not mandatory for Metronome to work.

Testing

You can switch now to the examples/l3fwd directory to test our main example.