How Hoda Boosts Open vSwitch Performance by Up to 1.7×

Recently, a paper titled “Hoda: a High‑performance Open vSwitch Dataplane with Multiple Specialized Data Paths” co‑authored by researchers from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, ByteDance, the CAS Computer Network Information Center and Intel, was accepted to EuroSys 2024, a top‑tier international systems conference with a 16 % acceptance rate.

The authors identify that Open vSwitch (OvS), widely used for flexible programmable data planes in cloud networks, suffers significant forwarding performance loss in complex scenarios such as tunnels and stateful firewalls. Fine‑grained performance diagnosis reveals that the root cause lies in the mismatch between diverse forwarding tasks and OvS’s one‑size‑fits‑all dataplane design.

To address this gap, they propose Hoda, a customized dataplane framework for OvS that provides multiple specialized data paths. Compared with the latest OvS, Hoda achieves up to 1.7× higher throughput, and end‑to‑end Nginx service request latency can be reduced by about 20 %.