Publikation
A Wake-Up Call for Kernel-Bypass on Modern Hardware
Matthias Jasny; Muhammad El-Hindi; Tobias Ziegler; Carsten Binnig
In: Proceedings of the 21st International Workshop on Data Management on New Hardware, DaMoN 2025, Berlin, Germany, June 22-27, 2025. International Workshop on Data Management on New Hardware (DaMoN), Pages 14:1-14:5, ACM, 2025.
Zusammenfassung
Kernel-bypass technologies eliminate the overhead of traditional
OS stacks, offering direct access to high-speed I/O devices such
as network and storage. This paper argues that kernel-bypass is
no longer an optional optimization but a necessary architectural
strategy for I/O-heavy applications like database systems. The mo-
tivation stems from two trends: stagnating CPU performance and
rapid advances in I/O hardware, such as 800 Gbit/s NICs and SSDs
exceeding 12M IOPS. In our evaluation, we show that, given these
trends, it is no longer possible for DBMSs to saturate modern NICs
or SSDs with traditional kernel stacks. We thus urge the research
community to prioritize kernel-bypass technologies to fully harness
the potential of emerging hardware in database systems.