Orange Publishes An In-Kernel eBPF-Powered Cache - Can Speed Up Memcached By ~18x

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Orange Publishes An In-Kernel eBPF-Powered Cache - Can Speed Up Memcached By ~18x

French telecommunications giant Orange has published "BMC" as the (e)BPF Memory Cache providing a cache focused on memcached usage within the Linux kernel...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Orange-BPF-Memory-Cache-BMC

[piorunz]

"is said to be crash-safe"
Pinky promise.

[vladpetric]

"is said to be crash-safe"
Pinky promise.

"By design the eBPF VM and its programs are intentionally not Turing complete: no loops are allowed (there is work-in-progress to support bounded loops) so each eBPF program is guaranteed to finish and not hang, all memory access is bounded and type-checked (including registers, a MOV instruction can change the type of a register), there are no null dereferences, a program must have at most BPF_MAXINSNS instructions (default 4096), the "main" function takes a single argument (the context) and so on. These kinds of restrictions enable simple and fast correctness verification when an eBPF program is loaded in the kernel and its instructions get parsed into a directed-acyclic-graph by a verifier module."

From: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-b...-introduction/

This of course doesn't mean that it's bug free. But it's orders of magnitude safer than your typical C server application.

[linuxgeex]

It's very cool to see what can be done today with today's tools, ie using a nail to drive hammers, if it works, lol.

In 5 years it will probably be made redundant by liburing and/or user-mode interrupt handling.