Dalio: In-Kernel Centralized Replication for Key-Value Stores

• Published in: IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems Vol. E108.D; no. 2; pp. 157 - 160
• Main Author: KIM, Gyuyeong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Tokyo The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers 01.02.2025; Japan Science and Technology Agency
• Subjects: Hardware; in-kernel acceleration; networking stacks; Replication; replication protocol
• ISSN: 0916-8532; 1745-1361
• DOI: 10.1587/transinf.2024EDL8060

Replication is commonly used in distributed key-value stores for high availability. Recent works show that centralized replication provides high throughput through low-overhead write coordination and consistency-aware read forwarding. Unfortunately, they rely on specialized hardware, which is deploy-challenging and poses various limitations. To this end, we present Dalio, a software-based centralized replication system that does not require extra hardware while supporting high throughput. Our key idea is to offload the replication function to per-shard load balancers with eBPF, an emerging kernel-native technique. By building a replication coordinator with eBPF, we can avoid burdensome kernel networking stack overhead. Our experimental results show that Dalio achieves throughput better than the vanilla Linux by up to 2.05× and is comparable to a hardware-based solution.