gpu_ext: Extensible OS Policies for GPUs via eBPF

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Zheng, Yusheng, Yu, Tong, Yang, Yiwei, Jiang, Minghui, Gao, Xiangyu, Su, Jianchang, Hu, Yanpeng, Mao, Wenan, Zhang, Wei, Williams, Dan, Quinn, Andi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Zheng, Yusheng
Yu, Tong
Yang, Yiwei
Jiang, Minghui
Gao, Xiangyu
Su, Jianchang
Hu, Yanpeng
Mao, Wenan
Zhang, Wei
Williams, Dan
Quinn, Andi
author_facet Zheng, Yusheng
Yu, Tong
Yang, Yiwei
Jiang, Minghui
Gao, Xiangyu
Su, Jianchang
Hu, Yanpeng
Mao, Wenan
Zhang, Wei
Williams, Dan
Quinn, Andi
contents Performance in modern GPU-centric systems increasingly depends on resource management policies, including memory placement, scheduling, and observability. However, uniform policies typically yield suboptimal performance across diverse workloads. Existing approaches present a tradeoff: user-space runtimes provide programmability and flexibility but lack cross-tenant visibility and fine-grained control of hardware resources; meanwhile, modifications to the OS kernel introduce significant complexity and safety risks. To address this, we argue that the GPU driver and device layer should provide an extensible OS interface for policy enforcement. While the emerging eBPF technology shows potential, directly applying existing host-side eBPF is insufficient because they lack visibility and control into critical device-side events, and directly embedding policy code into GPU kernels could compromise safety and efficiency. We propose gpu_ext, an eBPF-based runtime that treats the GPU driver and device as a programmable OS subsystem. gpu_ext extends GPU drivers by exposing safe programmable hooks and introduces a device-side eBPF runtime capable of executing verified policy logic within GPU kernels, enabling coherent and transparent policies. Evaluation across realistic workloads including inference, training, and vector search demonstrates that gpu_ext improves throughput by up to 4.8x and reduces tail latency by up to 2x, incurring low overhead, without modifying or restarting applications
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_12615
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle gpu_ext: Extensible OS Policies for GPUs via eBPF
Zheng, Yusheng
Yu, Tong
Yang, Yiwei
Jiang, Minghui
Gao, Xiangyu
Su, Jianchang
Hu, Yanpeng
Mao, Wenan
Zhang, Wei
Williams, Dan
Quinn, Andi
Operating Systems
Performance in modern GPU-centric systems increasingly depends on resource management policies, including memory placement, scheduling, and observability. However, uniform policies typically yield suboptimal performance across diverse workloads. Existing approaches present a tradeoff: user-space runtimes provide programmability and flexibility but lack cross-tenant visibility and fine-grained control of hardware resources; meanwhile, modifications to the OS kernel introduce significant complexity and safety risks. To address this, we argue that the GPU driver and device layer should provide an extensible OS interface for policy enforcement. While the emerging eBPF technology shows potential, directly applying existing host-side eBPF is insufficient because they lack visibility and control into critical device-side events, and directly embedding policy code into GPU kernels could compromise safety and efficiency. We propose gpu_ext, an eBPF-based runtime that treats the GPU driver and device as a programmable OS subsystem. gpu_ext extends GPU drivers by exposing safe programmable hooks and introduces a device-side eBPF runtime capable of executing verified policy logic within GPU kernels, enabling coherent and transparent policies. Evaluation across realistic workloads including inference, training, and vector search demonstrates that gpu_ext improves throughput by up to 4.8x and reduces tail latency by up to 2x, incurring low overhead, without modifying or restarting applications
title gpu_ext: Extensible OS Policies for GPUs via eBPF
topic Operating Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12615