EPSO: A Caching-Based Efficient Superoptimizer for BPF Bytecode

Abstract

Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) allows developers to extend Linux kernel functionality without modifying its source code. To ensure system safety, an in-kernel safety checker, the verifier, enforces strict safety constraints (e.g., a limited program size) on eBPF programs loaded into the kernel. These constraints, combined with eBPF’s performance-critical use cases, make effective optimization essential. However, existing compilers (e.g., Clang) offer limited optimization support, and many semantics-preserving transformations are rejected by the verifier, which makes handcrafted optimization rule design both challenging and limited in effectiveness.Superoptimization overcomes the limitations of rule-based methods by automatically discovering optimal transformations, but its high computational cost limits scalability. To address this, we propose EPSO, a caching-based superoptimizer that discovers rewrite rules via offline superoptimization, and reuses them to achieve high-quality optimizations with minimal runtime overhead. We evaluate EPSO on benchmarks from the Linux kernel and several eBPF-based projects, including Cilium, Katran, hXDP, Sysdig, Tetragon, and Tracee. EPSO discovers 795 rewrite rules and achieves up to 68.87% (avg. 24.37%) reduction in program size compared to Clang’s output, outperforming the state-of-the-art BPF optimizer K2 on all benchmarks and Merlin on 92.68% of them. Additionally, EPSO reduces program runtime by an average of 6.60%, improving throughput and lowering latency in network applications.