In recent years, the adoption of the service mesh as a dedicated infrastructure layer to support cloud-native systems has gained significant popularity. Service meshes involve the incorporation of proxies to handle communication between microservices, thereby speeding up the development and deployment of microservice applications. However, the use of service meshes also increases the request latency because they elongate the packet transmission between services. After investigating the transmission path of packets in a representative service mesh Istio, we observed that the service mesh dedicates approximately 25% of its time to packet transmission in the Linux kernel network stack. To shorten this process, we propose a non-intrusive solution that enables packets to bypass the kernel network stack through the implementation of socket redirection and tc (traffic control) redirection with eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter). We also conduct comprehensive experiments on the widely-used Istio. The evaluation results show that our approach can significantly reduce the request latency by up to 21%. Furthermore, our approach decreases CPU usage by 1.73% and reduces memory consumption by approximately 0.98% when compared to the original service mesh implementation.

近年来，采用服务网格作为支持云原生系统的专用基础设施层已广受欢迎。服务网格涉及合并代理来处理微服务之间的通信，从而加快微服务应用程序的开发和部署。然而，服务网格的使用也会增加请求延迟，因为它们延长了服务之间的数据包传输。在研究了代表性服务网格 Istio 中数据包的传输路径后，我们发现服务网格将大约 25% 的时间用于 Linux 内核网络堆栈中的数据包传输。为了缩短这个过程，我们提出了一种非侵入式解决方案，通过使用 eBPF（扩展伯克利数据包过滤器）实现套接字重定向和 tc（流量控制）重定向，使数据包能够绕过内核网络堆栈。我们还对广泛使用的 Istio 进行了全面的实验。评估结果表明，我们的方法可以显着降低请求延迟高达 21%。此外，与原始服务网格实现相比，我们的方法将 CPU 使用率降低了 1.73%，并将内存消耗降低了约 0.98%。