Vancouver Systems #5
Join us for two talks on systems programming and some discussions. Food and water provided. Drinks purchasable at the bar.
Doors open at 6 pm; talks start at 6:30 pm.
Talks
Kaiyue Wei
Modern Linux page cache eviction uses one fixed LRU-based policy for every workload — databases, key-value stores, and ML pipelines all get the same treatment. This talk shows how eBPF's bpf_arena and struct_ops let you write custom, verifier-safe page eviction policies that run inside the kernel without patching or recompiling it. I'll walk through building a BPF-arena-backed policy on Linux 6.18: tracepoints, arena-resident linked lists, and a full end-to-end eviction pipeline, from candidate proposal to actual reclaim. Along the way I'll share the verifier constraints, kernel panics, and performance tradeoffs discovered while getting it working.
Andrés Villegas
At Resonate, we made our durable execution SDKs simple by using the "crash-only software" ideas described in the paper "Crash-Only Software" by George Cande and Armando Fox. I will explore how crash-only software should work and how it enabled Resonate's simple, durable execution ideas.