The NIC should be part of the OS

2025/01/17 by Pengcheng Xu, Timothy Roscoe · 1 voice · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #Radiation Effects in Electronics #cs.AR #cs.NI #cs.OS

paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/3713082.3730388

openalex publication_date 2025/05/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

Abstract

The network interface adapter (NIC) is a critical component of a cloud server occupying a unique position. Not only is network performance vital to efficient operation of the machine, but unlike compute accelerators like GPUs, the network subsystem must react to unpredictable events like the arrival of a network packet and communicate with the appropriate application end point with minimal latency.

Cited by

• Mainframe-Style Channel Controllers for Modern Disaggregated Memory Systems

Discussions

• [arXiv] The NIC should be part of the OS arxiv.org/abs/2501.1... Which uses a cache coherent NIC to allow greater offload of an RPC stack to the NIC. CXL permitting cache coherent devices is a much [bsky, 13 points, 0 comments]

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