fig_19_compare-dpdk

TX throughput experiment (Unikraft v.s. DPDK)

This experiment evaluates the performance of Unikraft's uknetdev API. To this end we wrote a simple application that sends as many packets as possible from one machine (with varying packet sizes), and measure the achieved throughput on a different machine running a DPDK testpmd application.

How to run

Server

The server is running on the first machine (in the AE testbed, this is uktut1). For this experiment we change TXONLY_DEF_PACKET_LEN from dpdk/app/test-pmd/testpmd.h in linux dpdk and test_dpdk/basic_forward/pktgen.h in unikraft in order to vary packet sizes.

Following sizes are explored: 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, and 1500.

unikraft vhost user

First, prepare the environment and build the Unikraft unikernel:

./prepare.sh

Then, we start the vhost:

cd server
./run_vhost.sh

This is going to pop an interactive shell. In this shell, enter the following commands:

port stop all
set fwd mac
port start all
start

Finally, in another terminal, start the Unikraft unikernel that uses the vhost-user port:

cd server
./prepare.sh
cd unikraft/uk_test_suite/
./run_vhost_user.sh

Note: If the value of TXONLY_DEF_PACKET_LEN is changed, Unikraft has to be rebuilt. To do this, run:

make

unikraft vhost net

Similar with the vhost user, but without dpdk:

First, prepare the environment and build the Unikraft unikernel:

./prepare.sh

cd server
./prepare.sh
cd unikraft/uk_test_suite/
./run_vhost_net.sh

Linux

For this experiment, we use a linux VM with DPDK preinstalled.

Client

The client is running on a second machine, connected to the first machine with a 10Gb/s ethernet cable. In the AE testbed, this corresponds to uktut2.

./build.sh
cd client
./prepare.sh
./run_client.sh

We now enter the following commands in the interactive test-pmd shell:

set fwd rxonly
start

To see the results:

show ports stats all

Example output, the result is 14204107.

testpmd> show port stats all

######################## NIC statistics for port 0 ######################## RX-packets: 3064735220 RX-missed: 0 RX-bytes: 253701795528 RX-errors: 0 RX-nombuf: 0 TX-packets: 0 TX-errors: 0 TX-bytes: 0

Throughput (since last show) Rx-pps: 14204107 Tx-pps: 0 ############################################################################

## Cleaning

Run this command on both client and server

./clean.sh

## Notes

We make use of huge pages for this experiment, which has the following Linux
kernel parameters:

default_hugepagesz=1G hugepagesz=1G hugepages=4