XRP: In-Kernel Storage Functions with eBPF

A significant recognition of eBPF's potential.

This is a followup of an earlier paper at HostOS 21 (https://sigops.org/s/conferences/hotos/2021/#program), by the same research group. Previous discussion on the earlier paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26601841

Prior to this work, eBPF is mostly used for networking and kernel tracing.

Networking has a very rigid framework, and eBPF is mainly doing things that can be done in old techs (DPDK etc), but is supposedly better. But that might be always clear-cut superiority, a recent discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31982026 shows the claimed superiority of DPDK comes with a lot of caveats.

Kernel tracing with eBPF is mainly for observability purpose. It's very useful. But has not been able to bring business value directly to software users.

Now with XRP, eBPF offered, for the first time, unprecedented and novel capability for accelerating IOs circumvent the existing Kernel + userspace separation.

I am very keen on the development of this area.