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Schooling NOOBs with eBPF

Published: 10 September 2023 Publication History

Abstract

While networks have evolved in profound ways, the tools to measure them from end hosts have not kept pace. State-of-the-art tools are ill-suited for elucidating observed network performance impairments and path dynamics, and are susceptible to operational policies of the network. Consequently, the semantic gap between the application-view of network performance vs. actual conditions has resulted in network oblivious (NOOB) systems and applications.
To address this NOOB problem, we examine the Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) as a new way to improve the practice of gathering fine-grained network telemetry from the edge. More specifically, by leveraging the safe and efficient in-kernel programming mechanism of eBPF, we design a high-performance telemetry framework called nooBpf with two tools---namely noobprobe and noobflow---to quantify the actual network performance from end hosts and offer unprecedented insights into the flow-level performance, including in-network queuing and routing-induced delays. We illustrate the potential of these two tools to address the NOOB problem through a variety of experiments. The results of our experiments strongly suggest eBPF as a promising foundation for high-performance telemetry and for addressing the NOOB problem.

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  • (2024)Measuring Network Latency from a Wireless ISP: Variations Within and Across SubnetsProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3688438(29-43)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024

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cover image ACM Conferences
eBPF '23: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on eBPF and Kernel Extensions
September 2023
96 pages
ISBN:9798400702938
DOI:10.1145/3609021
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 10 September 2023

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Author Tags

  1. extended berkeley packet filter
  2. network measurement

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eBPF '23
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eBPF '23: 1st Workshop on eBPF and Kernel Extensions
September 10, 2023
NY, New York, USA

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eBPF '23 Paper Acceptance Rate 12 of 21 submissions, 57%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 12 of 21 submissions, 57%

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  • (2024)Measuring Network Latency from a Wireless ISP: Variations Within and Across SubnetsProceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference10.1145/3646547.3688438(29-43)Online publication date: 4-Nov-2024

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