Network Stack Parallelism

• Network stack was already threaded in 4.x

  • 4.x had user threads, netisr, dispatched crypto
  • 5.x/6.x add ithreads

• Assignment of work to threads

  • Threads involved are typically user threads, netisr, and ithreads
  • Work split over many threads for receive
  • On transmit, work tends to occur in one thread
  • Opportunities for parallelism in receive are greater than in transmit for a single user thread