Research Fund

2024 Research Grant Recipients

The eBPF Foundation awarded five grants worth $50,000 each in 2024 for academic research of benefit to the eBPF community. Recipients include:

Learned Virtual Memory with eBPF, Dimitrios Skarlatos, Carnegie Mellon University – The increased memory capacity in data centers, coupled with the proliferation of memory-intensive applications has made virtual memory translation a major performance bottleneck. This issue is about to get much worse due to several factors: i) the inherent hardware limits of TLB scaling, which has already surpassed L2 cache latencies, ii) the advent of terabyte-scale memory capacity through technologies like CXL, and iii) the increasing prevalence of memory-intensive applications. The goal of this project is to introduce an extensible eBPF interface for memory management, enabling lightweight, machine-learning techniques within the Linux kernel that can automatically adapt to the memory needs of individual processes.
Improving eBPF Complexity with a Hardware-backed Isolation Environment, Zhe Wang, Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing – The current design of the eBPF verifier poses both security and complexity challenges, which restricts the wider use of eBPF programs. The researchers believe that eBPF is a new type of kernel-mode application, and should adopt the method of isolation rather than verification to ensure the kernel security. Therefore, this project will design a hardware-assisted isolation execution environment for eBPF programs, which not only can achieve the same level of security as the verifier, but also incurs a very low performance overhead.
Lazy Abstraction Refinement with Proof for an Enhanced Verifier, Zhendong Su, and Hao Sun, ETH Zürich – This project introduces a novel approach—lazy abstraction refinement with proof—to enhance the precision of the eBPF verifier. By selectively and lazily refining abstractions with higher precision verification techniques and encoding refinements in machine-checkable proofs, the approach significantly improves the precision while maintaining a manageable complexity. Proofs generated in user space and validated in kernel space ensure minimal overhead. The implementation and thorough evaluation will demonstrate its effectiveness, with the goal of integration into the upstream and extending the adoption of eBPF.
Verified Path Exploration for eBPF Static Analysis, Srinivas Narayana and Santosh Nagarakatte, Rutgers University – This project continues an existing effort in the Agni project to formally verify algorithms in the eBPF verifier. Specifically, the researchers will explore formal verification and proofs of soundness for a key algorithm in the verifier, namely path pruning, which enables fast safety checking for eBPF programs with a large number of static code paths. The soundness of path pruning is security-critical since incorrect pruning may result in the execution of malicious programs in the kernel. This project takes the first steps towards formal verification of path pruning, by specifying conditions for soundness, and developing systematic techniques to prove soundness and uncover bugs.
Efficient IO-Intensive μs-scale Applications using eBPF, Yueyang Pan, Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi, Rishabh Iyer, and Sanidhya Kashyap, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) – This project will extend the eBPF subsystem and the Linux kernel to serve as the substrate for building a dedicated runtime for hosting μs-scale applications on Linux while ensuring efficient resource utilization. As part of this proposal, EPFL aims to flexibly customize existing IO data paths in the kernel (networking, storage) to build a fast path fitting the functional requirements of applications. Further, they will design a fiber abstraction that enables efficient application logic offloading to the kernel.

Details on the 2024 program follow below. The 2025 academic research grant program will be announced in Spring 2025.

eBPF Foundation is pleased to invite university/research-institute faculty to respond to this call for research proposals on eBPF; up to 2 awards are available. We are interested in making awards on a wide range of eBPF research, including, but not limited to[1]:

eBPF program verification, and formal verification of the verifier and JITs
Limitations of the eBPF verifier and approaches to overcome them
Scalability and maintainability of the eBPF verifier
Improvements to eBPF program development and deployment
eBPF-based approaches to security and threat management
eBPF-based approaches to network performance analysis and optimization
eBPF-based approaches to application profiling/tracing
eBPF-based approaches to CPU scheduling
eBPF-based approaches for improving application efficiency
Previously unexplored, under-explored, and emerging use cases of eBPF
Techniques to optimize eBPF programs, for example static or dynamic optimizations
Usage of hardware security or performance features to benefit eBPF
Approaches to improving the in-kernel JIT compilers for eBPF
Safe enablement of unprivileged eBPF for application usage
Interaction between eBPF and end-host networking
eBPF use cases in high-performance networking
Security implications and innovations for end-host programmability using eBPF
Approaches to scaling eBPF programs in large-scale distributed systems
Techniques for software or hardware fault isolation in eBPF or related systems

To Apply

Applications are now closed and under review.

Application Timeline

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Requirements

Proposals should include:

A summary of the project (2 pages maximum) explaining the area of focus, a description of techniques, any relevant prior work, and a timeline with milestones and expected outcomes.
A draft budget description (1 page) including an approximate cost of the award and explanation of how funds would be spent.
Curriculum Vitae for all project participants.
Organization details including tax information and administrative contact details.

Eligibility

Awards must comply with applicable U.S. and international laws, regulations and policies.
Applicants must be current full-time or part-time faculty at an accredited academic institution or at a reputed research institute.
Applicants must be the Principal Investigator on any resulting award.

Additional Information

Payment will be made to the proposer’s host university as an unrestricted gift. Because of its nature, salary/headcount could be included as part of the budget presented for the RFP. Since the award/gift is paid to the university, they will be able to allocate the funds to that winning project and have the freedom to use as they need.
Award funds can be used to cover a researcher’s salary. Typically research funds ideally cover graduate or post-graduate students’ employment/tuition and other research costs (e.g., equipment, laptops, incidental costs).

Terms & Conditions

By submitting a proposal, you are authorizing eBPF Foundation to evaluate the proposal for a potential award, and you agree to the terms herein.
You agree that eBPF Foundation will not be required to treat any part of the proposal as confidential or protected by copyright.
You agree and acknowledge that personal data submitted with the proposal, including name, mailing address, phone number, and email address of you and other named researchers in the proposal may be collected, processed, stored and otherwise used by eBPF Foundation for the purposes of evaluating the contents of the proposal.
You acknowledge that neither party is obligated to enter into any business transaction as a result of the proposal submission, eBPF Foundation is under no obligation to review or consider the proposal, and neither party acquires any intellectual property rights as a result of submitting the proposal.

[1] Most of the topics are taken from ACM Sigcomm 2023 eBPF Workshop topics