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.
