Forceful flow termination for accelerated networking

A system comprising:

• a hardware accelerator that:
• maintains a flow table of flow entries corresponding to active flows;
• identifies, from the flow table, a flow entry corresponding to a flow between a source virtual machine and a destination virtual machine that satisfies predefined criteria for flow termination;
• transmits a flow termination request for the flow that includes flow match characteristics extracted from the flow entry of the flow table;
• transforms a first transport control protocol (TCP) reset packet according to a transformation defined in the flow entry for the flow in response to determining that the first TCP reset packet includes header information matching the flow match characteristics;
• and
• forwards the first TCP reset packet to a host of the destination virtual machine;
• and
• deletes the flow entry from the flow table;
• and
• a software-based reset packet generator that:
• receives the flow termination request;
• generates the first TCP reset packet;
• and
• transmits the first TCP reset packet back to the hardware accelerator.

One or more tangible computer-readable storage media encoding processor-executable instructions for executing a computer process for forcefully terminating a flow between two endpoints in a network, the computer process comprising:

• identifying a flow entry that corresponds to a flow that satisfies predefined criteria for flow termination, the flow entry residing in a flow table maintained by a hardware accelerator;
• transmitting, by the hardware accelerator, a flow termination request for the flow to a software-based reset packet generator, the flow termination request including flow match characteristics for the flow extracted from the flow entry of the flow table;
• in response to receiving the flow termination request, generating a first transport control protocol (TCP) reset packet at the software-based reset packet generator, the first TCP reset packet including header information that matches the flow match characteristics for the flow;
• transmitting, by the software-based reset packet generator, the first TCP reset packet to the hardware accelerator;
• at the hardware accelerator, creating a transformed TCP reset packet by transforming the first TCP reset packet according to a first transformation defined in the flow entry and transmitting the transformed TCP reset packet to a first one of the two endpoints;
• and
• deleting the flow entry from the flow table.