DATE: Thursday, March 14, 2024
TIME: 12:00 - 1:00 pm
PLACE: GHC 4405
SPEAKER: Asaf Cidon, Columbia University
TITLE: Back to the Future! Revisiting old extensible kernel ideas with eBPF on Linux
ABSTRACT:
In the 80's and 90's, there was a surge of exciting operating system designs, focused on how applications can customize and extend the kernel for their specific needs. While these designs never achieved direct widespread adoption, with the introduction of the eBPF framework, we can now customize and extend a monolithic OS like Linux in similar ways envisioned by these earlier works. In this talk, I present our work on XRP, which allows applications to execute user-defined storage-functions, such as index lookups or aggregations, deep within the kernel, safely bypassing most of Linux's storage stack. I will also describe a new disaggregated storage framework, BPF-oF, which uses a similar approach to speed up widely-used storage systems such as RocksDB by ~3X. Finally, I will discuss our group's ongoing work on further customizing and extending Linux to make common datacenter workloads run much more efficiently.
BIO:
Asaf Cidon is an associate professor of EE and CS (jointly affiliated) at Columbia University. He has broad research interests in software systems and security. His group's research was adopted in commercial systems used by many companies, including Meta, Apple and Snowflake, was recognized by best paper awards at OSDI, UseSec, CIDR, and ATC, and by the NSF CAREER and ARO young investigator awards. Prior to joining Columbia, Asaf spent several years in industry, where his last role was SVP and co-GM of Email Protection at Barracuda Networks. He joined Barracuda via the acquisition of Sookasa, a startup where he was the CEO and co-founder. He obtained a PhD and MS from Stanford and BS from the Technion.
VISITOR HOST: Rashmi Vinayak
VISITOR COORDINATOR: Matt McMonagle
SDI SEMINAR QUESTIONS?
Karen Lindenfelser, 86716, or visit www.pdl.cmu.edu/SDI/