In-network computing (INC) offers orders-of-magnitude performance gains for various applications. However, the existing pipeline-based switch architecture, though well-suited for stateless packet forwarding, imposes three constraints on stateful INC applications: (i) control-plane table management, (ii) scarce memory resources under per-stage layout, and (iii) a strict memory access model. To address these constraints, this paper provides a full-stack solution, covering a programmable chipset Solar-NP, a programming language NPC, and a complete toolchain XuanWu. First, Solar-NP adopts a run-to-completion-based (RTC-based) architecture with three new hardware features: data-plane table management, a hierarchical memory pool, and built-in data structures with atomic access guarantees. Second, to fully exploit the hardware features, our language NPC introduces a new abstraction, namely operation-action table (OAT), that allows table manipulations in the data plane. Finally, our XuanWu toolchain provides various utility software covering the complete workflow of developing, testing, debugging, and deployment. To show the power of our solution, we implement three types of INC cases, including in-network control, in-network telemetry, and in-network storage. Experimental results demonstrate that our solution allows more operations to be offloaded and achieves higher performance than today's pipeline-based solutions.

Modern memory management systems suffer from poor performance and subtle concurrency bugs, slowing down applications while introducing security vulnerabilities. We observe that both issues stem from the conventional design of memory management systems with two levels of abstraction: a software-level abstraction (e.g., VMA trees in Linux) and a hardware-level abstraction (typically, page tables). This design increases portability but requires correctly and efficiently synchronizing two drastically different and complex data structures, which is generally challenging.