Juno Kim’s recent paper “SubZero: Zero-copy IO for Persistent Main Memory File Systems” was selected for the Best Paper Award at 11th ACM Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems (APSys’20).
SubZero introduces two new system calls, peek() and patch(), that avoid data copying overheads while conducting IO on PMEM file systems. These copying overheads were unavoidable and problematic with the conventional POSIX read(), write() interface due to their inherent copy-based semantics. Implemented in two state-of-the-art PMEM file systems, XFS in DAX mode and NOVA, SubZero improves the performance of real-world applications, Apache Web Server up to 3.6x, and Kyoto Cabinet up to 1.3x with simple code changes.