FreeBSD's Multi-Processor Network Stack

Robert Watson

This talk describes the FreeBSD SMPng Project work to produce a high performance and multi-processor scalable network stack for the FreeBSD operating system. It focuses on the high level goals for the SMPng Project, the design approach of SMPng, and the impact of the SMPng design on the network stack. Technical approaches, challenges, trade-offs, results, analysis, and areas of further work will be presented. This talk will be appropriate for a relatively technical audience familiar with basic concepts of TCP/IP networking and BSD systems; experience with multi-threaded programming or kernel programming may be helpful, but is not required.

About the Author

Until recently, Robert Watson was a Senior Principal Scientist at SPARTA ISSO, and previously McAfee Research, leading a variety of security research and development projects sponsored by DARPA and other US government agencies, as well as commercial customers such as Apple Computer. Technical work he has lead includes the TrustedBSD Mandatory Access Control Framework (MAC Framework), FreeBSD Access Control Lists, Mac OS X audit implementation, Type Enforcement on FreeBSD and Darwin, distributed denial of service, active networks, and recently, significant work on the FreeBSD SMPng Network Stack. Mr Watson has recently returned to Academia to work on a PhD at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, Security Research Group.

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