  Network function (NF) offloading on SmartNICs has been widely used in modern
data centers, offering benefits in host resource saving and programmability.
Co-running NFs on the same SmartNICs can cause performance interference due to
onboard resource contention. Therefore, to meet performance SLAs while ensuring
efficient resource management, operators need mechanisms to predict NF
performance under such contention. However, existing solutions lack
SmartNIC-specific knowledge and exhibit limited traffic awareness, leading to
poor accuracy for on-NIC NFs. This paper proposes Tomur, a novel performance
predictive system for on-NIC NFs. Tomur builds upon the key observation that
co-located NFs contend for multiple resources, including onboard accelerators
and the memory subsystem. It also facilitates traffic awareness according to
the behaviors of individual resources to maintain accuracy as the external
traffic attributes vary. Evaluation using BlueField-2 SmartNIC shows that Tomur
improves the prediction accuracy by 78.8% and reduces SLA violations by 92.2%
compared to state-of-the-art approaches, and enables new practical usecases.
