Accelerating Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7-based Linux Containers with Solarflare OpenOnload

Linux Containers combine well-established Linux kernel technologies such as namespaces, SELinux, cgroups and iptables with incredible ease of use and exceptional performance.

For customers looking for the lowest possible network latencies and reduced CPU overhead coupled with the deployment advantages of Linux containers, Red Hat's new Accelerating Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7-based Linux Containers with Solarflare OpenOnload whitepaper provides installation, configuration and tuning guidance for Docker containers running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Solarflare OpenOnload network acceleration.

The whitepaper introduces container-related enhancements specific to Red Hat’s distribution such as the atomic utility, the implementation of “super-privileged containers” (SPC) and heavily builds upon the Low Latency Performance Tuning Guide for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Finally, it provides a comparison of OpenOnload-accelerated bare metal network latency tests versus OpenOnload-accelerated Linux containers.

One of the most obvious benefits of Linux containers is how naturally existing tuning knowledge and procedures translate to container deployments.  This was evident in the relatively small delta in configuration paradigm between bare metal and container-based deployments of OpenOnload.  In addition to easy deployment, performance of the OpenOnload network stack inside a Linux container was equivalent to bare metal with half-round-trip latencies in the low single-digit microseconds.