arxivcs.OScs.ARcs.NI2026-07-17
Rethinking Polling Efficiency in Service Core Network Stacks
Matheus Stolet, Simon Peter, Antoine Kaufmann
Idle network service cores are treated as wasted compute. This assumption motivates increasingly sophisticated mechanisms that reclaim idle cores at microsecond timescales. We argue that this view no longer matches modern server hardware. On contemporary multicore processors, act…