Related papers: New Mechanism for Fast System Calls

Operating systems rely on system calls to allow the controlled communication of isolated processes with the kernel and other processes. Every system call includes a processor mode switch from the unprivileged user mode to the privileged…

Protected user-level libraries have been proposed as a way to allow mutually distrusting applications to safely share kernel-bypass services. In this paper, we identify and solve several previously unaddressed obstacles to realizing this…

Increasing data center network speed coupled with application requirements for high throughput and low latencies have raised the efficiency bar for network stacks. To reduce substantial kernel overhead in network processing, recent…

GPUs are becoming first-class compute citizens and are being tasked to perform increasingly complex work. Modern GPUs increasingly support programmability- enhancing features such as shared virtual memory and hardware cache coherence,…

Smart devices see a large number of ephemeral tasks driven by background activities. In order to execute such a task, the OS kernel wakes up the platform beforehand and puts it back to sleep afterwards. In doing so, the kernel operates…

The cost of communication between the operating system kernel and user applications has long blocked improvements in software performance. Traditionally, operating systems encourage software developers to use the system call interface to…

With rapid advances in network hardware, far memory has gained a great deal of traction due to its ability to break the memory capacity wall. Existing far memory systems fall into one of two data paths: one that uses the kernel's paging…

"Rootless containers" is a concept to run the entire container runtimes and containers without the root privileges. It protects the host environment from attackers exploiting container runtime vulnerabilities. However, when rootless…

Overheads in Operating System kernel network stacks and sockets have been hindering OSes from managing networking operations efficiently for years. Moreover, when building Remote Procedure Calls over TCP, certain TCP features do not match…

Quantum devices can process data in a fundamentally different way than classical computers. To leverage this potential, many algorithms require the aid of a quantum Random Access Memory (QRAM), i.e. a module capable of efficiently loading…

Browsers, Library OSes, and system emulators rely on sandboxes and in-process isolation to emulate system resources and securely isolate untrusted components. All access to system resources like system calls (syscall) need to be securely…

In an overloaded FaaS cluster, individual worker nodes strain under lengthening queues of requests. Although the cluster might be eventually horizontally-scaled, adding a new node takes dozens of seconds. As serving applications are tuned…

Over the years, artificial neural networks have been applied successfully in many areas including IT security. Yet, neural networks can only process continuous input data. This is particularly challenging for security-related non-continuous…

The overhead of the kernel storage path accounts for half of the access latency for new NVMe storage devices. We explore using BPF to reduce this overhead, by injecting user-defined functions deep in the kernel's I/O processing stack. When…

The rapid advancement of AI workloads and domain-specific architectures has led to increasingly diverse processor microarchitectures, whose design exploration requires fast and accurate performance validation. However, traditional workflows…

The lookup procedure in Linux costs a significant portion of file accessing time as the virtual file system (VFS) traverses the file path components one after another. The lookup procedure becomes more time consuming when applications…

Data intensive applications on clusters often require requests quickly be sent to the node managing the desired data. In many applications, one must look through a sorted tree structure to determine the responsible node for accessing or…

Here we consider the speed at which quantum information can be transferred between the nodes of a linear network. Because such nodes are linear oscillators, this speed is also important in the cooling and state preparation of mechanical…

Remote procedure calls are the workhorse of distributed systems. However, as software engineering trends, such as micro-services and serverless computing, push applications towards ever finer-grained decompositions, the overhead of…

Timing channels are information flows, encoded in the relative timing of events, that bypass the system's protection mechanisms. Any microarchitectural state that depends on execution history and affects the rate of progress of later…