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