2026-09-25 –, GPN-T Main Room
At the Operating Systems Group at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), we are working on what we call a CXL-based hybrid SSD, a novel type of SSD that offers byte-granular and synchronous access modes in addition to the traditional block-based communication commonly found in present-day commercial devices.
This research project encompasses the entire stack: hardware, (system) firmware, and software. Based on our own custom hardware prototype, we are developing operating system-level mechanisms to leverage the possibilities of this new concept. Here is where firmware comes into play: among other ideas, we are pursuing a design based on a firmware/OS co-design approach to create a new form of system suspend. This research direction is fundamentally enabled by boot chain transparency. Without open-source firmware, this would not be possible. We have presented early proof-of-concept designs in previous talks and will give an update on some of the progress we have made and the broader scope of this project in this talk.
Yussuf is a 4th year PhD student in operating systems at KIT. His primary research interests encompass CXL, storage technologies, and power management.