Netkit: Specializing Linux Packet Delivery for Container Networks

📅 2026-09-16
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🤖 AI Summary
本文提出netkit,利用eBPF技术优化Linux网络栈,减少容器间通信开销,提高吞吐量,解决云原生微服务架构中的性能瓶颈问题。
📝 Abstract
Cloud-native microservices architectures rely on network namespaces for isolation, with the overhead of container communications remaining a critical performance bottleneck. While colocating containers on the same host mitigates some of this overhead, it cannot match the performance of communication within a single network namespace. Existing solutions either require application rewrites or fail to support the full Linux network stack expected by containerized applications. In this paper, we present netkit, an eBPF-based datapath that specializes the Linux networking stack to eliminate redundant backlog queue traversals during network namespace transitions. netkit leverages eBPF to transparently redirect packets between namespaces, bypassing unnecessary buffering while preserving compatibility with existing container applications. Our implementation in the Linux kernel, integrated with minimal changes to the Cilium network plugin for Kubernetes, improves throughput by up to 37\% and achieves parity between container-to-container and process-to-process communications, effectively closing the performance gap introduced by namespace isolation.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

container networks
network namespaces
performance bottleneck
Linux network stack
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

eBPF
network namespace
packet redirection
container network
performance optimization
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