Delilah: eBPF-offload on Computational Storage

Abstract

The idea of pushing computation to storage devices has been explored for decades, without widespread adoption so far. The definition of Computational Programs namespaces in NVMe (TP 4091) might be a breakthrough. The proposal defines device-specific programs, that are installed statically, and downloadable programs, offloaded from a host at run-time using eBPF. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of Delilah, the first public description of an actual computational storage device supporting eBPF-based code offload. We conduct experiments to evaluate the overhead of eBPF function execution in Delilah, and to explore design options. This study constitutes a baseline for future work.