The extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) is a recent technology available in the Linux kernel that enables flexible data processing. However, so far the eBPF was mainly used for monitoring tasks such as memory, CPU, page faults, traffic, and more, with a few examples of traditional network services, e.g., that modify the data in transit. In fact, the creation of complex network functions that go beyond simple proof-ofconcept data plane applications has proven to be challenging due to the several limitations of this technology, but at the same time very promising due to some characteristics (e.g., dynamic recompilation of the source code) that are not available elsewhere. Based on our experience, this paper presents the most promising characteristics of this technology and the main encountered limitations, and we envision some solutions that can mitigate the latter. We also summarize the most important lessons learned while exploiting eBPF to create complex network functions and, finally, we provide a quantitative characterization of the most significant aspects of this technology.
The sheer increase in network speed and the massive deployment of containerized applications in a Linux server has led to the consciousness that iptables, the current de-facto firewall in Linux, may not be able to cope with the current requirements particularly in terms of scalability in the number of rules. This paper presents an eBPF-based firewall, bpf-iptables, which emulates the iptables filtering semantic while guaranteeing higher throughput. We compare our implementation against the current version of iptables and other Linux firewalls, showing how it achieves a notable boost in terms of performance particularly when a high number of rules is involved. This result is achieved without requiring custom kernels or additional software frameworks (e.g., DPDK) that could not be allowed in some scenarios such as public data-centers.
This paper presents Polycube, an open-source software framework based on eBPF, that enables the creation of arbitrary and complex network function chains. Each function can include an efficient in-kernel data plane and a flexible userspace control plane with strong characteristics of isolation, persistence (e.g., across server reboots) and composability. In addition, a generic model for the control and management plane of each network function simplifies the manageability and accelerates the development of new network services. We validate the framework by creating different network services and benchmarking their performance in a complex scenario, namely a network provider for Kubernetes. Results show that Polycube programs are about 20x shorter than equivalent programs implemented with vanilla-eBPF.
This paper proposes an architecture that can optimize inter-VM communication in an NFV environment through the creation of direct channels between virtual machines. Particularly, our prototype can transparently optimize the data transfer between virtual machines running DPDK applications by dynamically recognizing the existence of pointto-point connections in the traffic steering rules, reverting back to the traditional VM-to-switch-to-VM approach when the optimization is no longer possible. This paper demonstrates the huge advantages of this architecture and the possibility to implement it with localized modifications mainly in Open vSwitch, without touching the applications inside the VMs.
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