Plug & Offload: Transparently Offloading TCP Stack onto Off-path SmartNIC with PnO-TCP

Abstract: Host CPU resources are heavily consumed by TCP stack processing, limiting scalability in data centers. Existing offload methods typically address only partial functionality or lack flexibility. This paper introduces PnO (Plug & Offload), an approach to fully offload TCP processing transparently onto off-path SmartNICs (NVIDIA BlueField DPUs). Key to our solution is PnO-TCP, a novel TCP stack specifically designed for efficient execution on the DPU's general-purpose cores, panning both the host and the SmartNIC to facilitate the offload. PnO-TCP leverages a lightweight, user-space stack based on DPDK, achieving high performance despite the relatively modest computational power of off-path SmartNIC cores. Our evaluation, using real-world applications (Redis, Lighttpd, and HAProxy), demonstrates that PnO achieves transparent TCP stack offloading, leading to both substantial reductions in host CPU usage and, in many cases, significant performance improvements, particularly for small packet scenarios (< 2KB) where RPS gains of 34%-127% were observed in single-threaded tests. Our evaluation, using real-world applications (Redis, Lighttpd, and HAProxy), demonstrates that PnO achieves transparent TCP stack offloading, leading to both substantial reductions in host CPU usage and, in many cases, significant performance improvements, particularly for small packet scenarios (< 2KB) where RPS gains of 34%-127% were observed in single-threaded tests.