Electrode: Accelerating Distributed Protocols with eBPF
summary
Electrode implements three eBPF kernel offloads — broadcasting, fast-ack, quorum counting — using TC/XDP offloads to run common Multi-Paxos path operations inside the kernel without modifying or rebooting Linux. It reduces per-request user‑kernel crossings (from ~14 to ~5), avoids full kernel stack traversal, and offloads packet cloning, ring buffering, and quorum counting. On Multi‑Paxos it reports up to 128.4% throughput improvement and up to 41.7% latency reduction compared with the vanilla kernel, and reaches roughly half the performance of DPDK bypass.
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chapters (14)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:26Cloud applications need consensus protocols for high availability
- 0:58Example: a simplified Multi-Paxos consensus protocol
- 1:52Kernel networking: Multi-Paxos incurs high kernel overhead
- 2:47Kernel bypassing: does it solve all problems?
- 5:12Leveraging eBPF to accelerate Paxos implementation
- 6:58Challenges of processing Paxos messages in eBPF
- 9:10message broadcasting
- 10:21fast acknowledging
- 11:29waiting on quorum
- 12:17State synchronization challenge
- 13:41Evaluation overview
- 14:11Load-latency curves (5 replicas)
- 15:22Electrode Summary
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