Xen Project Developer Summit

While virtualization technologies like Xen have been around for a long time, it is only in recent years that they have started to be targeted as viable systems for implementing middlebox processing (e.g., firewalls, NATs). But can they provide this functionality while yielding the high performance expected from hardware-based middlebox offerings? In this talk Joao Martins will introduce ClickOS, a tiny, MiniOS-based virtual machine tailored for network processing. In addition to the vm itself, Joao Martins will describe performance improvements done to the entire Xen I/O pipe. Finally, Joao Martins will discuss an evaluation showing that ClickOS can be instantiated in 30 msecs, can process traffic at 10Gb/s for almost all packet sizes, introduces delay of 40 microseconds and can run middleboxes at rates of 5 Mp/s.