A Memory Pool Allocator for eBPF Applications
Gyuyeong Kim, Dongsu Han · 2025
eBPF enables high-performance kernel-level execution by eliminating networking stack traversal and context switching. Despite the advantages, eBPF applications face strict memory management constraints due to the eBPF verifier requirements that mandate static memory allocation. This limitation imposes a fundamental tradeoff between application performance and memory efficiency, ultimately restricting the potential of eBPF. We present Kerby, a dynamic memory pool allocator for eBPF that enables eBPF applications to dynamically manage pre-allocated memory by representing variable-length data as collections of fixed-size blocks. This allows applications to increase the amount of kernel-resident data while minimizing internal fragmentation. Our preliminary evaluation with key-value store implementations demonstrates that Kerby achieves significant improvements in both memory utilization and throughput.