Work

uXDP: Frictionless XDP Deployments in Userspace

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Modern network function (NF) deployments face a fundamental trade-off: kernel-based extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) NFs provide safety, portability, and an extensive tooling ecosystem, but are limited in performance, while kernel-bypass frameworks deliver high throughput but lack integrated verification and ease of deployment. We present uXDP, a new runtime that unifies these worlds by running unmodified, verified XDP programs in userspace. uXDP ensures compatibility and preserves the verification-driven safety, portability, and familiar workflows of eBPF while moving execution into the userspace, enabling more aggressive optimizations and flexibility. Without recompiling eBPF code, uXDP achieves throughput gains of up to 3.3× over in-kernel execution and improves Meta's Katran load balancer performance by 40%, all while retaining the trusted eBPF development model and deployment simplicity.

DOI: 10.1145/3748355.3748360

Authors: Yusheng Zheng, Panayiotis Gavriil, Marios Kogias

Institutions: University of California, Santa Cruz, D. E. Shaw Research, Imperial College London

Language: English

Topic: Network Packet Processing and Optimization

Subfield: Hardware and Architecture

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

OpenAlex ID: W4413311681

FWCI: 2.785

Cites: 15

Cited by: 3

Related to: 10