anil

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anil episodes

  • [VMIL'25] The Wild West of post-POSIX IO Interfaces

    Mirror of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abDWZ9D8kEE

    The Wild West of post-POSIX IO Interfaces (Video, VMIL 2025)

    Anil Madhavapeddy
    (University of Cambridge, UK)

    Abstract: The POSIX programming model has provided a long-standing abstraction for I/O, but contemporary systems increasingly expose interfaces that deviate from this model in pursuit of performance, scalability, and flexibility. This talk traces the evolution of shared-memory and asynchronous I/O mechanisms, beginning with early hypervisor-driven approaches such as Xen’s virtual device drivers, and continuing through to modern system interfaces including Linux’s io_uring and macOS’s libdispatch. These developments illustrate the growing fragmentation of the I/O landscape, but also highlight opportunities for unifying abstractions that balance expressivity with ergonomics for these highly concurrent interfaces.

    As a case study, I will discuss how Docker integrates these heterogeneous interfaces into end-to-end data paths. Finally, I will present ongoing work in the OCaml 5 ecosystem, where effect-based concurrency abstractions, as implemented in the Eio library, offer a principled way of reconciling post-POSIX I/O mechanisms with high-level language runtimes. My perspective aims to inform discussions on virtual machine and runtime design, with implications for concurrency models, performance engineering, and cross-platform systems support.

    Presentation at the VMIL 2025 workshop, Oct 15, 2025, https://conf.researchr.org/home/icfp-splash-2025/vmil-2025

    Sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN.

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  • [ICFP'25] Functional Networking for Millions of Docker Desktops

    Mirror of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_Y6hmj-VpY

    Functional Networking for Millions of Docker Desktops (Experience Report) (Video, ICFP 2025)
    Anil Madhavapeddy, David J. Scott, Patrick Ferris, Ryan T. Gibb, and Thomas Gazagnaire
    (University of Cambridge, UK; Docker, UK; University of Cambridge, UK; University of Cambridge, UK; Tarides, France)

    Abstract: Docker is a developer tool used by millions of developers to build, share and run software stacks. The Docker Desktop clients for Mac and Windows have long used a novel combination of virtualisation and OCaml unikernels to seamlessly run Linux containers on these non-Linux hosts. We reflect on a decade of shipping this functional OCaml code into production across hundreds of millions of developer desktops, and discuss the lessons learnt from our experiences in integrating OCaml deeply into the container architecture that now drives much of the global cloud. We conclude by observing just how good a fit for systems programming that the unikernel approach has been, particularly when combined with the OCaml module and type system.

    Article: https://doi.org/10.1145/3747525

    ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8954-2428, https://orcid.org/0009-0006-5555-9671, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0778-8828, https://orcid.org/0009-0009-5702-3143, https://orcid.org/0009-0001-6893-4630

    Video Tags: ocaml, containers, networking, hypervisors, icfp25main-p58-p, doi:10.1145/3747525, orcid:0000-0001-8954-2428, orcid:0009-0006-5555-9671, orcid:0000-0002-0778-8828, orcid:0009-0009-5702-3143, orcid:0009-0001-6893-4630

    Presentation at the ICFP 2025 conference, October 13–15, https://icfp25.sigplan.org/

    Sponsored by ACM SIGPLAN,

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  • Des satellites pour protéger les hérissons, en voie d'extinction

    🦔 Sa population a diminué de 50 % par endroits en Europe : le hérisson pourrait disparaître à court ou moyen terme. En France, de nombreux centres de soin œuvrent à sa protection. Des satellites jouent également un rôle dans la conservation de cette espèce. #jt13h

    (aka 1m 48s for Anil talking about hedgehogs and Tessera, briefly!)

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  • The Wild West of UNIX I O

    Inter-process communication and remote procedure call facilities have existed in operating systems for many decades. Ever since the first parallel applications ran on time-sharing machines, programmers have sought ways to communicate between processes running on a single machine, and the first networked applications introduced the concept of sending a message to trigger a remote action.

    And today, these primitives are more relevant than ever before: parallel programming on clusters of machines relies heavily on facilities to pass data between processes and hosts. On a higher level, data-flow frameworks for parallel processing of large data sets (such as Hadoop or CIEL) depend on passing data between different tasks, which may run anywhere, including local to a machine, on a networked cluster, or far away in a virtualised wide-area "cloud".
    And yet, we are stuck with UNIX communication APIs closely coupled to the underlying mechanisms used to implement them: the programmer choice of sockets, pipes or shared memory constitutes an implicit choice of a whole set of assumptions about the relative locations of the communicating parties, as well as how the message is to be delivered. Worse even, the implicit trade-offs may not be the same in a different environment, and thus the programmer's choice of API depends on assumptions about the runtime environment (hardware, software and setup) in addition to the characteristics inherent to a mechanism implied.
    This talk will firstly discuss the impossibility of using current APIs efficiently (via benchmarks on a diverse set of hardware (from many-core AMDs to the experimental Intel SCC). Finally, I will describe our work on introducing a hierarchical name system and extended socket API that adds support for automatic transport selection and reconfigurable sockets. This permits many NUMA-related optimisations on single hosts, for VMs to switch to shared memory communication if on the same physical host, and for seamless network-wide protocol upgrades to multi path TCP or TCPcrypt.

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  • NotCon 2004: Spotcodes

    This is the (very low quality) video from my talk at NotCon 2004 on SpotCodes, mirrored from https://web.archive.org/web/20050204012820/http://www.ejhp.net/notcon/#video

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About anil

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Videos from Anil Madhavapeddy. Many of these are mirrors of ones available elsewhere online, but here for digital permanence.