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Abstract:

In interrupt-driven operating systems, high packet arrival rates can result in receive livelock, a situation where the host uses all of its capacity to receive incoming data, and cannot usefully process any of it. Solutions to eliminate or prevent receive livelock typically involve extensive (and potentially costly) modifications to the host operating system. In this paper we propose a novel adapter-based solution to eliminate receive livelock, called intelligent interface backoff. This solution utilizes additional intelligence on network adapters to detect host input load levels and dynamically modulate the rate at which interrupts are delivered to the host. Using qualitative and quantitative comparisons, we argue that an adapter-based approach for receive livelock elimination performs at least as well as, but is more cost-effective than, the host-based approaches proposed in the literature. We also demonstrate how intelligent interface backoff can be employed effectively in multi-homed hosts engaged in simultaneous network input from multiple network interfaces, while providing minimum input bandwidths to each interface even under extreme overload conditions. Key Words--- Receive livelock, network adapters, interrupt management, operating system.

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