Zhongjie Chen, Tsinghua University; Qingkai Meng, Nanjing University; ChonLam Lao, Harvard University; Yifan Liu and Fengyuan Ren, Tsinghua University; Minlan Yu, Harvard University; Yang Zhou, UC Berkeley and UC Davis
Evolving datacenters with diverse application demands are driving network transport designs. However, few have successfully landed in the widely-used kernel networking stack to benefit broader users, and they take multiple years. We present eTran, a system that makes kernel transport extensible to implement and customize diverse transport designs agilely. To achieve this, eTran leverages and extends eBPF-based techniques to customize the kernel to support complex transport functionalities safely. Meanwhile, eTran carefully absorbs user-space transport techniques for performance gain without sacrificing robust protection. We implement TCP (with DCTCP congestion control) and Homa under eTran, and achieve up to 4.8×/1.8× higher throughput with 3.7×/7.5× lower latency compared to existing kernel implementation.
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author = {Zhongjie Chen and Qingkai Meng and ChonLam Lao and Yifan Liu and Fengyuan Ren and Minlan Yu and Yang Zhou},
title = {{eTran}: Extensible Kernel Transport with {eBPF}},
booktitle = {22nd USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 25)},
year = {2025},
isbn = {978-1-939133-46-5},
address = {Philadelphia, PA},
pages = {407--425},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi25/presentation/chen-zhongjie},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = apr
}
