Morpheus: A Run Time Compiler and Optimizer for Software Data Planes

State-of-the-art approaches to design, develop and optimize software packet-processing programs are based on static compilation: the compiler’s input is a description of the forwarding plane semantics and the output is a binary that can accommodate any control plane configuration or input traffic. In this paper, we demonstrate that tracking control plane actions and packet-level traffic dynamics at run time opens up new opportunities for code specialization. We present Morpheus, a system working alongside static compilers that continuously optimizes the targeted networking code. We introduce a number of new techniques, from static code analysis to adaptive code instrumentation, and we implement a toolbox of domain specific optimizations that are not restricted to a specific data plane framework or programming language. We apply Morpheus to several systems, from eBPF and DPDK programs including Katran, Meta’s production-grade load balancer to container orchestration solutions such a Kubernets. We compare Morpheus to state-of-the-art optimization frameworks and show that it can bring up to 2x throughput improvement, while halving the 99th percentile latency.