一句话：提出流水线感知的子遍历缓存，利用 vSwitch 管线中共享片段提升 SmartNIC 缓存命中率与规则覆盖。
现代云和边缘云依赖高性能端主机网络栈，vSwitch 承担策略执行与转发；但将其卸载到 SmartNIC 后，有限内存难以容纳增长的流规则空间，传统缓存命中率低且扩展性差。Gigaflow 利用可编程 vSwitch 管线的流水线感知局部性：策略（L2、L3、ACL）及执行顺序（P4、OpenFlow）使多个流共享相同管线片段。系统不再缓存整条流，而是为共享子遍历建立缓存规则，实现跨流复用并提升缓存效率与规则空间覆盖。评估显示，相较 Megaflow，Gigaflow 命中率最高提升 51%（平均 25%），有限内存内覆盖规则空间最多扩大 450 倍，并保持线速。
The success of modern public/edge clouds hinges heavily on the performance of their end-host network stacks if they are to support the emerging and diverse tenants' workloads (e.g., distributed training in the cloud to fast inference at the edge). Virtual Switches (vSwitches) are vital components of this stack, providing a unified interface to enforce high-level policies on incoming packets and route them to physical interfaces, containers, or virtual machines. As performance demands escalate, there has been a shift toward offloading vSwitch processing to SmartNICs to alleviate CPU load and improve efficiency. However, existing solutions struggle to handle the growing flow rule space within the NIC, leading to high miss rates and poor scalability. In this paper, we introduce Gigaflow, a novel caching system tailored for deployment on SmartNICs to accelerate vSwitch packet processing. Our core insight is that by harnessing the inherent pipeline-aware locality within programmable vSwitch pipelines-defining policies (e.g., L2, L3, and ACL) and their execution order (e.g., using P4 and OpenFlow)-we can create cache rules for shared segments (sub-traversals) within the pipeline, rather than caching entire flows. These shared segments can be reused across multiple flows, resulting in higher cache efficiency and greater rule-space coverage. Our evaluations show that Gigaflow achieves up to a 51% improvement in cache hit rate (average 25% improvement) over traditional caching solutions (i.e., Megaflow), while capturing up to 450x more rule space within the limited memory of today's SmartNICs-all while operating at line speed.
@inproceedings{Zulfiqar0KPA025,
title = {G
<scp>igaflow</scp>
: Pipeline-Aware Sub-Traversal Caching for Modern SmartNICs},
author = {Annus Zulfiqar and Ali Imran and Venkat Kunaparaju and Ben Pfaff and Gianni Antichi and Muhammad Shahbaz},
booktitle = {ASPLOS},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.1145/3676641.3716000}
}