  Nowadays, datacenters lean on a computer-centric approach based on monolithic
servers which include all necessary hardware resources (mainly CPU, RAM,
network and disks) to run applications. Such an architecture comes with two
main limitations: (1) difficulty to achieve full resource utilization and (2)
coarse granularity for hardware maintenance. Recently, many works investigated
a resource-centric approach called disaggregated architecture where the
datacenter is composed of self-content resource boards interconnected using
fast interconnection technologies, each resource board including instances of
one resource type. The resource-centric architecture allows each resource to be
managed (maintenance, allocation) independently. LegoOS is the first work which
studied the implications of disaggregation on the operating system, proposing
to disaggregate the operating system itself. They demonstrated the suitability
of this approach, considering mainly CPU and RAM resources. However, they
didn't study the implication of disaggregation on network resources. We
reproduced a LegoOS infrastructure and extended it to support disaggregated
networking. We show that networking can be disaggregated following the same
principles, and that classical networking optimizations such as DMA, DDIO or
loopback can be reproduced in such an environment. Our evaluations show the
viability of the approach and the potential of future disaggregated
infrastructures.
