Top all-time · #4868
Irene Zhang
Personal blog · irenezhang.net/blogsystemsprogramming
Irene Zhang's personal blog at irenezhang.net covers systems and programming. Since 2016, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 18 times, most often “The Case for a High-Level Kernel-Bypass I/O Abstraction (2019)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-06, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Posts about research on kernel-bypass I/O (the Demikernel), with links to the accompanying papers. Other linked work covers Paxos-style consensus (WPaxos) and decentralized web apps (AutoDapp).
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The Case for a High-Level Kernel-Bypass I/O Abstraction (2019)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-10-06
- /papers/demikernel-hotos19.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-05-23
- The Demikernel Datapath OS Architecture for Microsecond-Scale Datacenter Systems [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-10-05
- Consistency should be more consistent2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-11-08
What Hacker News says?
great point! This was about as simple as it got in order to ship something quickly that was minimally intrusive. So the prototype as it is now buys you sequential consistency, but I want to detangle some great points you made. 1. Performance: The performance is probably going to be limited. In the sense that most databases have better performance than most blockchain implementations. So you're arbitrarily bottleneck…
Comment linking /papers/tapir-tocs18.pdf
on “AutoDapp: a proposal to decentralize existing web apps”Submitted The Case for a High-Level Kernel-Bypass I/O Abstraction as a story · 67 points
HN discussionI'm not thinking of strict serializability - I do actually mean linearizability. My previous comments were referring to the basic algorithm presented as the main contribution of this paper in section 3. In this algorithm, "Every command accesses only one object o." With each operation applying to a single object and each object satisfying linearizability, the system as a whole will be linearizable. The distinction b…
Comment linking /blog/2015/02/01/consistency.html
on “WPaxos: a wide area network Paxos protocol”Submitted I’m Not Dead yet; The Role of the Operating System in a Kernel-Bypass Era [pdf] as a story · 64 points
HN discussionPaper can be found here: http://irenezhang.net/papers/demikernel-hotos19.pdf
Comment linking /papers/demikernel-hotos19.pdf
on “The Case for a High-Level Kernel-Bypass I/O Abstraction”Submitted The Case for a High-Level Kernel-Bypass I/O Abstraction (2019) as a story · 61 points
HN discussionI've updated the blog post with our experimental results from the Redis benchmark. Here is a link to the graph: http://irenezhang.net/img/demikernel-redis-exp.jpg
Comment linking /img/demikernel-redis-exp.jpg
on “The Case for a High-Level Kernel-Bypass I/O Abstraction”Submitted Consistency should be more consistent as a story · 50 points
HN discussionSee https://irenezhang.net/papers/demikernel-sosp21.pdf for a more thorough paper on the Demikernel from 2021. There are some great ideas for improving the kernel interface while still allowing efficient DPDK-style pipelines.
Comment linking /papers/demikernel-sosp21.pdf
on “The Case for a High-Level Kernel-Bypass I/O Abstraction (2019)”Submitted The Case for a High-Level Kernel-Bypass I/O Abstraction as a story · 16 points
HN discussionhttp://irenezhang.net/papers/demikernel-hotos19.pdf Excerpt: "Researchers have long predicted the demise of the operating system [21, 26, 41]. As datacenter servers increasingly incorporate I/O devices that let applications bypass the OS kernel (e.g., RDMA [12] and DPDK [15] network devices or SPDK storage devices), this prediction may finally come true. While kernel-bypass devices do eliminate the OS kernel from th…
Comment linking /papers/demikernel-hotos19.pdf
on “Demikernel: A library OS for kernel-bypass devices, now with Rust TCP/IP stack”Submitted The Case for a High-Level Kernel-Bypass I/O Abstraction as a story · 16 points
HN discussionSubmitted Moral Implications of Being Moderately Successful Computer Scientist and a Woman as a story · 13 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Case for a High-Level Kernel-Bypass I/O Abstraction as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted My Job as a Microsoft Researcher as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted My Job as a Microsoft Researcher as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Fall of Datacenter Software as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Demikernel Datapath OS Architecture for Microsecond-Scale Datacenter Systems [pdf] as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
