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Explore this 16-minute conference talk from NSDI '25 that examines Intel's user interrupts feature and its potential to revolutionize preemptive scheduling in userspace applications. Learn how researchers from UC San Diego investigated the underutilization of preemptive scheduling in server-side software, where high-performance datacenter systems typically rely on cooperative concurrency due to the high overhead of traditional preemption mechanisms. Discover how user interrupts enable interrupts to be sent and received entirely in user space, significantly reducing preemption overhead compared to existing approaches. Understand the construction and evaluation of two user-level schedulers that leverage user interrupts for low-overhead preemption, and examine the performance trade-offs and limitations of this technology. Gain insights into how user interrupts can match or exceed the performance of existing mechanisms while providing more consistent overheads and maintaining a user-friendly programming model, though with certain constraints when other software layers limit scheduling policy flexibility.
