Design of standard OS–NIC and application–NIC interfaces

Determine a standardized interface specification between the operating system and the network interface controller (NIC), and between user-space applications and the NIC, within the Lauberhorn architecture so that scheduling-aware RPC dispatch and OS–NIC coordination can be supported efficiently and robustly.

Background

The paper argues that modern kernel-bypass networking architectures preserve a sub-optimal split of state between the operating system and the NIC, limiting flexibility for dynamic workloads. It proposes Lauberhorn, a prototype that tightly integrates the NIC with the OS via cache-coherent interconnects, enabling the NIC to perform RPC decoding and dispatch using precise kernel scheduling state.

While the design sketches the receive path, control-plane protocol, and scheduling integration, the authors note that a general, standard interface between the OS and NIC, and between applications and the NIC, remains unresolved. Establishing such an interface is necessary to generalize Lauberhorn’s mechanisms beyond a prototype and to support broader adoption across platforms and workloads.