3rd Workshop on eBPF and Kernel Extensions (eBPF)

Monday, September 8th | Full-day Workshop

Location

The workshop will take place at Room Aeminium - A.

Program

08:00 — 08:45 | Registration

09:00 — 09:15 | Welcome and Introduction

09:15 — 10:30 | Keynote: XDP2: The Unified Open Source Programming Model for Software and Hardware Datapaths | Tom Herbert

Abstract: We introduce XDP2, the next generation technology for the programmable datapath. XDP2 builds on the incredible success of the eXpress DataPath, or XDP. The next frontier for XDP is programmable hardware which is becoming a critical requirement for the high performance, AI/ML, datapath. XDP2 is the ubiquitous programming model for the datapath across both software and hardware. Think of it as upleveling XDP with a few tweaks and generalizations to work in domain specific programmable hardware. We’ll cover how the model defines parsers, lookup tables, accelerators, packet metadata, and inter process communications in a way that’s amenable to both software and hardware. We’ll show how XDP2 works with canonical XDP to solve the fundamental problem in kernel offloads as well as to promote XDP as a modern day microkernel.

Biography: Tom Herbert is a visionary leader in networking, software development, and operating systems with 25+ years of industry experience. He has worked at Intel, Facebook, Google, and several startups leading development of SmartNICs, networking stacks, and operating systems for data centers at hyperscale. Tom is the inventor of several industry-transformational technologies including XDP and a myriad of features in Linux networking. He has four patents granted and one application pending.

10:30 — 11:00 | Morning coffee break

11:00 — 12:00 | Session 1: Performance Matters | Chair: Kostis Kaffes (Columbia University)

11:00 - 11:15

uXDP: Frictionless XDP Deployments in Userspace (Full)

Yusheng Zheng (UC Santa Cruz), Panayiotis Gavriil (The D. E. Shaw Group), Marios Kogias (Imperial College London)

11:15 - 11:30

No Two Snowflakes Are Alike: Studying eBPF Libraries' Performance, Fidelity and Resource Usage (Full)

Carlos Machado, Bruno Gião (INESC TEC & U. Minho), Sebastião Amaro, Miguel Matos (IST Lisbon & INESC-ID), João Paulo, Tânia Esteves (INESC TEC & U. Minho)

11:30 - 11:45

Performance Implications at the Intersection of AF_XDP and Programmable NICs (Full)

Marco Molè, Farbod Shahinfar, Francesco Maria Tranquillo, Davide Zoni (Politecnico di Milano), Aurojit Panda (NYU), Gianni Antichi (Politecnico di Milano)

11:45 - 12:00

Toward eBPF-Accelerated Pub-Sub Systems (Full)

Beihao Zhou, Samer Al-Kiswany, Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo (University of Waterloo)

12:00 — 12:45 | Session 2: We need new primitives | Chair: Marios Kogias (Imperial College London)

12:00 - 12:10

A Memory Pool Allocator for eBPF Applications (Short)

Gyuyeong Kim (Sungshin Women's University), Dongsu Han (KAIST)

12:10 - 12:20

SchedBPF - Scheduling BPF programs (Short)

Kavya Shekar, Dan Williams (Virginia Tech)

12:20 - 12:30

ChainIO: Bridging Disk and Network Domains with eBPF (Short)

Zheng Cao, He Xuhang (UC Merced), Yanpeng Hu (ShanghaiTech University), Yusheng Zheng, Yiwei Yang (UC Santa Cruz), Jianchang Su, Wei Zhang (University of Connecticut), Andi Quinn (UC Santa Cruz)

12:30 - 12:40

bpfCP: Efficient and Extensible Process Checkpointing via eBPF (Short)

Juntong Deng (King's College London), Stephen Kell (King's College London)

12:45 — 14:00 | Lunch Break

14:00 — 15:00 | Session 3: Time for Better and Safer Programming | Chair: Salvatore Pontarelli (Sapienza University of Rome)

14:00 - 14:15

Automatic Synthesis of Abstract Operators for eBPF (Full)

Harishankar Vishwanathan, Matan Shachnai, Srinivas Narayana, Santosh Nagarakatte (Rutgers University)

14:15 - 14:30

Pairwise BPF Programs Should Be Optimized Together (Full)

Milo Craun, Dan Williams (Virginia Tech)

14:30 - 14:45

Kernel Extension DSLs Should Be Verifier-Safe! (Full)

Franco Solleza, Justus Adam, Akshay Narayan, Malte Schwarzkopf (Brown University), Andrew Crotty (Northwestern University), Nesime Tatbul (Intel Labs and MIT)

14:45 - 15:00

Offloading the Tedious Task of Writing eBPF Programs (Full)

Xiangyu Gao, Xiangfeng Zhu (University of Washington), Bhavana Vannarth Shobhana (Rutgers University), Yiwei Yang (UC Santa Cruz), Arvind Krishnamurthy, Ratul Mahajan (University of Washington)

15:00 — 15:45 | Community Breakout Discussion

Breakout topics to be announced

15:45 — 16:15 | Afternoon Coffee Break

16:15 — 17:15 | Session 4: Profiling meets Machine Learning and Privacy | Chair: Paul Chaignon (Isovalent)

16:15 - 16:25

Empowering machine-learning assisted kernel decisions with eBPF^ML (Short)

Prabhpreet Singh Sodhi, Georgios Liargkovas, Kostis Kaffes (Columbia University)

16:25 - 16:40

eInfer: Unlocking Fine-Grained Tracing for Distributed LLM Inference with eBPF (Full)

Kexin Chu, Jianchang Su, Yifan Zhang (University of Connecticut), Chenxingyu Zhao (University of Washington), Yiwei Yang, Yusheng Zheng (UC Santa Cruz), Shengkai Lin, Shizhen Zhao (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Wei Zhang (University of Connecticut)

16:40 - 16:55

InXpect: Lightweight XDP Profiling (Full)

Vladimiro Paschali, Andrea Monterubbiano, Francesco Fazzari (University of Rome "La Sapienza"), Michael Swift (University of Wisconsin—Madison), Salvatore Pontarelli (University of Rome "La Sapienza")

16:55 - 17:10

BPFflow - Preventing information leaks from eBPF (Full)

Chinecherem Dimobi, Rahul Tiwari, Zhengjie Ji, Dan Williams (Virginia Tech)

17:10 — 17:40 | Closing Remarks | Workshop Organizers



Call for Papers

eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) is an innovative technology that has been gaining popularity in the networking and operating system community for its flexibility, safety, and efficiency in programming end-host network and OS stacks. Despite the numerous advantages of eBPF, there are several research challenges in leveraging it for novel use cases. These challenges include the difficulty in integrating eBPF into current systems, the potential performance overhead when executed in the kernel, limitations of existing programming hooks and APIs, and the programming restrictions and challenges imposed by the need for safety as enforced by the eBPF verifier. To tackle these issues, a cross-disciplinary approach is necessary, combining techniques across network protocol design, programming languages, operating systems, compilers, hardware architecture, and formal verification.


The workshop aims to bring together experts and practitioners in the field of eBPF, end-host networking, and operating systems to discuss and present the latest advances to support and apply this cutting edge technology. Submissions may show the benefits that eBPF can bring to real-world systems, explore mechanisms to improve or re-design existing eBPF mechanisms, examine the security implications of end-host programmability, or present measurement studies that reveal new and interesting directions for this ecosystem. We are looking for novel and previously unpublished ideas, systems, and measurements that address key issues and challenges in this growing area, position papers that outline directions for the research community, as well as preliminary papers from ongoing projects that could benefit from early community feedback.

Topics of Interest

We welcome submissions including, but not limited to, the following topics:

Submission Instructions

The 3rd workshop on eBPF and kernel extensions solicits submissions. We are looking for two-types of submissions:

  1. Research papers of up to 6 pages, including all figures, tables and appendices. Submissions must be original, unpublished work, that have not been concurrently submitted to other venues. Workshop papers will appear in ACM DL as a part of the official proceedings, and are thus considered published work.
  2. Extended abstracts, which are 2 pages in length (excluded references) submitted in the same format as the workshop papers. We‘re particularly interested in early-stage findings, position papers and works that are still in progress. This segment is designed for authors to showcase their preliminary or emerging ideas in a concise, impactful manner, and get early-stage feedback at the workshop. As such, these authors will be given the opportunity to present their work in the form of a lighting talk during the workshop.

Both types of papers can use as many additional pages as necessary for citations, and should be written using the two-column 10pt ACM SIGCOMM format. All submissions are double-blind. The program committee will review papers to determine relevance to the workshop, quality, and on the likelihood that it will elicit discussion among the attendees. At least one author from each accepted submission must attend the workshop to present and discuss their work.


Please submit your paper via https://ebpf25.hotcrp.com/

Important Dates

Submission deadline May 23rd, 2025 (Updated)
Acceptance notification June 23rd, 2025 (Updated)
Camera-ready deadline July 23rd, 2025 (Updated)
Workshop date September 8th, 2025

Organizers

General & Steering Committee Co-Chairs Institution
Sebastiano Miano Path Networks, Inc.
Srinivas Narayana Rutgers University
Paul Chaignon Isovalent at Cisco
Aurojit Panda New York University
Gianni Antichi Politecnico di Milano
Technical Program Committee Institution
Theophilus Benson CMU
Xiaoqi Chen Purdue University
Akshay Narayan Brown University
Toke Høiland-Jørgensen Red Hat
Gábor Rétvári BME-TMIT
Santosh Nagarakatte Rutgers University
Alireza Sanaee Huawei
Tamás Lévai Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Asaf Cidon Columbia University
Giuseppe Lettieri University of Pisa
Salvatore Pontarelli Sapienza - Università di Roma
Alireza Farshin NVIDIA
Kornilios Kourtis Isovalent at Cisco
Ryan Stutsman University of Utah
Ben Pfaff Feldera
Andrii Vasylevskyi Meta Platforms Inc
Yang Zhou UC Berkeley and UC Davis
Yu Jiang Tsinghua University
Kostis Kaffes Columbia University
Dan Williams Virginia Tech
Kahina Lazri Orange Innovation
Quentin De Coninck UMONS
Marios Kogias Imperial College London
Stefano Salsano Roma Tor Vergata
Israat Haque Dalhousie University
Ioannis Zarkadas Columbia University