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

Abstract

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 2.05x and is comparable to a hardware-based solution.