Announcing ATOMiK v0.4.0: Per-Container Waste Tracking for Kubernetes

Every fork(), every COW fault, every TCP retransmit — your kernel is doing work that may be completely redundant. ATOMiK v0.4.0 makes that waste visible, measurable, and attributable to the exact container that caused it.

What is ATOMiK?

ATOMiK is a delta-state algebra — four operations (LOAD, ACCUM, READ, SWAP) that replace snapshots, event replay, and full-state replication. Instead of storing state, you reconstruct it:

current_state = initial_state XOR accumulator

This is backed by 92 formally proven Lean4 theorems (commutativity, associativity, self-inverse, identity) and runs on everything from a Python pip install to custom FPGA silicon hitting 69.7 billion operations per second.

What's new in v0.4.0

1. COW Redundancy Detection

The kernel module installs a kretprobe on wp_page_copy() to fingerprint every copy-on-write page before and after the copy. If the content is identical — the copy was wasted work.

$ cat /sys/class/atomik/atomik0/cow_redundancy_rate
23.4%

That 23.4% means nearly a quarter of all COW faults in your system are copying pages that haven't actually changed. On a busy Kubernetes node with hundreds of pods forking workers, this adds up fast.

2. Network Send Deduplication

A kprobe on tcp_sendmsg() fingerprints every outgoing TCP buffer using hardware-accelerated CRC32C (SSE4.2). Consecutive identical sends to the same socket are flagged as redundant.

$ cat /sys/class/atomik/atomik0/net_redundancy_rate
8.7%

Common culprits: health check responses, polling APIs returning unchanged JSON, status endpoints serving cached data.

3. Per-Container Waste Attribution

The headline feature. Every COW fault and network send is tagged with the calling task's cgroup via task_dfl_cgroup(). Waste is aggregated per container and exposed via sysfs:

$ cat /sys/class/atomik/atomik0/cgroup_top
Container               COW Faults    COW Waste    Net Sends   Net Waste
api-server-7f8d4        1,234         12.5 MB      5,678       2.3 MB
worker-pool-3a2c        891           8.9 MB       3,210       1.1 MB
redis-cache-9e1b        234           2.3 MB       12,456      890 KB
monitoring-agent        170           1.7 MB       8,901       456 KB

For Kubernetes: each pod maps to its own cgroup. For Docker: each container gets its own entry under system.slice. The insight is instant and zero-overhead — no eBPF programs, no userspace polling, no sampling.

27 Real-Time Metrics

The full sysfs interface exposes 27 attributes under /sys/class/atomik/atomik0/:

• Core operations: ops_total, ops_load, ops_accum, ops_read, ops_swap
• Fingerprinting: fp_checks_total, fp_hit_rate, fp_bytes_saved
• COW: cow_faults_total, cow_redundancy_rate, cow_top (per-process)
• Network: net_sends_total, net_redundancy_rate
• Containers: cgroup_top (per-container breakdown)
• License: license_status (trial countdown or active)

Install in 60 seconds

# Download and install (free 90-day trial)
curl -sL https://atomik.tech/download/atomik-0.4.0.tar.gz | tar xz
cd atomik-0.4.0
sudo ./install.sh

# Check it's working
sudo atomik-status

Or start with the Python SDK

pip install atomik-core

# Run the benchmark on your machine
python -m atomik_core.benchmark

What's next

v0.4.0 detects waste. The next release will start eliminating it — COW copy suppression, network delta compression, and automated optimization recommendations. The kernel module already knows which copies are redundant; the next step is preventing them.

We're also bringing up ATOMiK on Xilinx Zynq for hardware-accelerated delta processing at 69.7 Gops/s — but that's a story for another post.