Lars Nolte presented our paper on IPC (Inter Process Communication) acceleration for Linux at this year’s Design Automation Conference (DAC). The paper is titled “HAWEN: Hardware Accelerator for Thread Wake-Ups in Linux Event Notification” and was generated in the context of a joint research project with a Huawei Team located in Grenoble, France. It introduces a concept for the Linux OS to offload the necessary wake-up call for sleeping threads that wait for events associated to a futex, socket, epoll, eventfd or pipe to a hardware component. The module called HAWEN is integrated into the Linux event notification in a minimally intrusive manner. In the paper we show that HAWEN can significantly reduce the duration of the associated syscall.

The yearly Design Automation Conference (DAC) is world-wide the major event in the area of electronic system design. This year’s conference is the 60th edition and it took place in San Francisco, CA form July 9-13. (Link to DAC)