Modern datacenter applications require low latency, high throughput access to the network. Using DPDK, applications can achieve signficantly better performance by bypassing the OS kernel; however, they still need support for traditional networking protocols like TCP. Existing user-level TCP libraries simply re-purpose existing kernel stacks or optimize for only high throughput, not low latency. We found that these libraries are too slow to meet the latency requirements of datacenter applications with new 100Gb datacenter networks offering 5 microsecond RTTs. To meet our requirements, we built a new TCP stack from the ground up for DPDK applications using Rust. Rust provides both memory and concurrency safety while remaining appropriate for low-latency environments. In this talk, I discuss our experience building a new low-latency TCP stack using Rust. I will present preliminary performance experiments and welcome input and contributions from the DPDK community in the continuing development of this stack.
