ATC 2025 Digest

13 papers selected. ASTERINAS: A Linux ABI-Compatible, Rust-Based Framekernel OS with a Small and Sound TCB Yuke Peng, Hongliang Tian, Junyang Zhang, Ruihan Li et al. TL;DR — A production-grade OS kernel written in Rust that exposes a full Linux ABI while confining unsafe code to a small, formally-audited framekernel core. Why notable — ASTERINAS demonstrates that Linux compatibility and memory-safety guarantees are not mutually exclusive — unsafe Rust is isolated to under 5 kloc of framework code, giving systems operators a credible path toward a safer Linux-compatible kernel without sacrificing application portability. ...

July 9, 2025 · Publish Assistant

NSDI 2025 Digest

13 papers selected. PRED: Performance-oriented Random Early Detection for Consistently Stable Performance in Datacenters Xinle Du, Tong Li 0014, Guangmeng Zhou, Zhuotao Liu et al. TL;DR — PRED redesigns AQM by making drop probability a direct function of per-flow performance targets rather than queue length, eliminating the instability of classic RED in modern datacenter workloads. Why notable — RED has been a cornerstone of congestion control for decades; PRED’s performance-centric reformulation challenges a long-held design axiom and demonstrates significantly lower tail latency at scale. It opens the door to intent-driven AQM as a first-class primitive in datacenter switches. ...

April 28, 2025 · Publish Assistant

EuroSys 2025 Digest

13 papers selected. Empowering WebAssembly with Thin Kernel Interfaces Arjun Ramesh, Tianshu Huang, Ben L. Titzer, Anthony Rowe 0001 TL;DR — A new OS interface design exposes thin, capability-based kernel primitives directly to WebAssembly modules, eliminating the POSIX translation layer. Why notable — WebAssembly is increasingly used beyond the browser as a portable, sandboxed compute substrate; this work shows that rethinking the system interface from scratch yields significantly lower overhead and better safety properties than layering Wasm on top of POSIX. ...

March 30, 2025 · Publish Assistant

Middleware 2024 Digest

11 papers selected. Chasing Lightspeed Consensus: Fast Wide-Area Byzantine Replication with Mercury Christian Berger 0006, Lívio Rodrigues, Hans P. Reiser, Vinicius Vielmo Cogo et al. TL;DR — Mercury is a wide-area Byzantine fault-tolerant replication protocol that minimises latency by exploiting geographic locality and pipelining to approach the theoretical lightspeed bound. Why notable — Achieving near-lightspeed latency in Byzantine replication across wide-area networks has been a long-standing open challenge; Mercury’s design demonstrates it is practically attainable. The result raises the bar for what production BFT middleware can deliver in geo-distributed deployments. ...

December 2, 2024 · Publish Assistant

SOSP 2024 Digest

13 papers selected. Verus: A Practical Foundation for Systems Verification Andrea Lattuada 0001, Travis Hance, Jay Bosamiya, Matthias Brun 0002 et al. TL;DR — Verus is a Rust-based verification framework that makes formal proofs of low-level systems code tractable at scale, covering memory safety, functional correctness, and concurrency. Why notable — Formal verification of real systems code has long been impractical; Verus closes the usability gap by integrating SMT-based proofs directly into a systems programming language, making it the most broadly applicable verification tool for the OS community to date. ...

November 5, 2024 · Publish Assistant