Archived-DMM
| DMM Facts |
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Project Lead: George Zhao
Repository: git clone https://gerrit.fd.io/r/dmm |
What is DMM
DMM (Dual Mode, Multi-protocol, Multi-instance) is to implement a transport agnostic framework for network applications that can
- Work with both user space and kernel space network stacks
- Use different network protocol stacks based on their functional and performance requirements (QOS)
- Work with multiple instances of a transport protocol stack
Use and engage or adopt a new protocol stack dynamically as applicable.
History
Emerging applications are bringing extremely high-performance requirements to their network systems. Eg. AR/VR, IoT etc. Many of these applications also have unique demands for QOS/SLA. Some application need a low latency network, some need high reliability, etc. Though such performance targets should be required for the complete communication system, the transport layer protocols play a key role and encounter a relatively higher challenge, because traditionally the TCP-based transport layer exploits the “best-effort” principle and inherently provides no performance guarantees. However, as internet applications rapidly grow and diversify, an all-powerful or one-size-fits-all protocol or algorithm becomes less feasible. Thus the traditional single-instance TCP-based network stack faces many challenges when serving applications with different QoS/SLA requirements simultaneously on the same platform.
Moving the networking stack out of the kernel is an occurring trend in both industry implementations and academic literature. Technologies like DPDK (and others) are improving performance of the network stack, bypassing the kernel and avoiding context-switching and data copies, as well as providing a complete set of packet-processing acceleration libraries.
Keeping the above trends in mind the DMM/nStack provides a framework where, system operators can plug in dedicated types of networking stack instances according to performance and/or functional requirements from the user space applications. The application need not consider changes to the transport layer API. A lightweight nStack management daemon is responsible for maintaining the stack instances and the app/socket-to-stack-mappings, which are provided via the orchestration/management interface.
Get Involved
- Bi-Weekly DMM Meeting.
- Join the DMM Mailing List.
- Join fdio-dmm IRC channel.
- Browse the code.
- 18.04 Release Plan
Start Here
How to submit a patch to DMM - Pushing Code with git review
Reference
Enabling “Protocol Routing”: Revisiting Transport Layer Protocol Design in Internet Communications - [1]
