Safe Sharing of Fast Kernel-Bypass I/O Among Nontrusting Applications

Abstract: Protected user-level libraries have been proposed as a way to allow mutually distrusting applications to safely share kernel-bypass services. In this paper, we identify and solve several previously unaddressed obstacles to realizing this design and identify several optimization opportunities. First, to preserve the kernel's ability to reclaim failed processes, protected library functions must complete in modest, bounded time. We show how to move unbounded waits outside the library itself, enabling synchronous interaction among processes without the need for polling. Second, we show how the bounded time requirement can be leveraged to achieve lower and more stable latency for inter-process interactions. Third, we observe that prior work on protected libraries is vulnerable to a buffer unmapping attack; we prevent this attack by preventing applications from removing pages that they share with the protected library. Fourth, we show how a trusted daemon can respond to asynchronous events and dynamically divide work with application threads in a protected library. By extending and improving the protected library model, our work provides a new way to structure OS services, combining the advantages of kernel bypass and microkernels. We present a set of safety and performance guidelines for developers of protected libraries, and a set of recommendations for developers of future protected library operating systems. We demonstrate the convenience and performance of our approach with a prototype version of the DDS communication service. To the best of our knowledge, this prototype represents the first successful sharing of a kernel-bypass NIC among mutually untrusting applications. Relative to the commercial FastDDS implementation, we achieve approximately 50\% lower latency and up to 7x throughput, with lower CPU utilization.