Felix Xiaozhu Lin 林 小竹

Felix Xiaozhu Lin 林小竹

Associate Prof.

William Wulf Faculty Fellow

UVA Computer Science

PhD (Rice ‘14); MS/BS (‘08/’06 Tsinghua). Grew up in a small midwestern town in China. Before UVA, six great years at Purdue.

A new instructional OS

A guided journey starting from bare-metal hardware to a fully functional OS capable of running multiple applications, including Mario and DOOM, on a multicore processor.

LLM (RWKV) on $30 hardware, under 3 Watt.

Model code | Demo code | Paper

collage2

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/3ff2dea0-e8e2-428c-ae50-8fa0e65eb2cf

Whisper streaming on Macbook Air, with 1 sec of delay. Total SoC power ~7 Watt.

Code | Paper

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/ad59f529-3567-4236-aabb-cca3ae0eeff8

1st LLM workshop at UVA (Oct 19/20 2024)

Prof. Yangfeng Ji and I organized the 1st LLM workshop at UVA.

Fall 2024: We are recruiting

(Recent projects) algo x sys x hw for:

On-device LLMs & Speech: on low-cost hardware
Stable diffusion: fast sampling on consumer CPU/GPU
Various old-fashioned, hardcore OS stuffs (see pubs below)

My group

I led a group of graduate/undergraduate students who are execited by building cool software stuffs.

See our group page for current students and projects.

Virginia is for lovers!

img/aerial.img The UVA campus at sunset, with Blue Ridge mountains in the back. Credit: UVA.

Efforts on refreshing OS education (UVA CS4414/CS6456). Principles: experience-based, with modern contents, and fun. Summary: four projects including an Arm64 baremetal kernel, multicore, trusted execution, and filesystem forensics.

The first offering in Fall’20 as CS6456. Well received! Materials; student feedbacks; schedule

Research (Publications)

I care about systems software. I work with a group of students with enthusiasm in systems software. See XSEL.

Our current work bases on two premises:

1. Old kernels (e.g. Linux) are firmware

Reuse via Replay: GPU replay [ASPLOS’22, Eurosys’23]; Driverlet [Eurosys’22].
Transkernel: unmodified Linux drivers on microcontroller-like cores (ATC’19 and HotMobile’17).
Overwatch: safeguarding unmodified file systems for IoT devices (preprint)
Power sandbox: power awareness redefined (Eurosys’18).

2. New OSes are defined by scenarios

STI: turbocharged NLP inference [ASPLOS’23]
Elf: autonomous AI cameras (Mobisys’20, 3-min video, website, slides)
VStore: managing large archival videos for analytics (Eurosys’19).
StreamBox: stream analytics with manycores (ATC’17), with 3D-stacked memory (ASPLOS’19), and with Arm TrustZone (ATC’19).

My PhD work was on OS kernels for smartphones, e.g. the K2 project which won an award in ASPLOS’14. I continue to care about mobile/wearables, e.g. deep learning on them (WWW’19 & MobiCom’18).

Doc, code, talks

Notes on hacking mobile GPUs
GPUReplay
Driverlet
Jun 2020: “OS frontiers in the AI era” For UVA graduate students. slides video
Mar 2019: Overview slides

Useful

Need a reference letter from me? | How do I determine final grades for undergrad classes? | How do we work with undergrads in research? | To signature requesters | Name in Chinese

img/forlovers.img We are one-hour from the gorgeous Shenandoah national park. Unlimited outdoor fun. Photo: http://virginia.org