venue: TOCS
year: 2025
selected:
  - title: "Whole-system Persistence Made Efficient with Tree-structured Checkpointing on Microkernel"
    authors:
    - Mingkai Dong
    - Fangnuo Wu
    - Gequan Mo
    - Haibo Chen
    tldr: "A microkernel-based whole-system persistence scheme uses tree-structured incremental checkpointing to achieve low-overhead, crash-consistent snapshots of the entire OS state."
    why_notable: "Whole-system persistence is a foundational building block for reliable systems; this paper shows it can be done efficiently within a microkernel architecture."
  - title: "XpuTEE: A High-Performance and Practical Heterogeneous Trusted Execution Environment for GPUs"
    authors:
    - Shulin Fan
    - Zhichao Hua
    - Yubin Xia
    - Haibo Chen
    tldr: "XpuTEE extends trusted execution environments to GPUs by designing a hardware-assisted isolation mechanism that protects GPU computations with low performance overhead."
    why_notable: "As GPUs process sensitive ML workloads in shared clouds, TEE support for accelerators is urgently needed; XpuTEE is a comprehensive and practical solution."
  - title: "RegVault II: Achieving Hardware-Assisted Selective Kernel Data Randomization for Multiple Architectures"
    authors:
    - Ruorong Guo
    - Yangye Zhou
    - Jinyan Xu
    - Wenbo Shen
    - Yajin Zhou
    - Rui Chang
    tldr: "RegVault II uses hardware features to selectively randomize sensitive kernel data structures at runtime across multiple ISAs, raising the bar for kernel exploitation."
    why_notable: "Kernel data-only attacks bypass existing code-randomization defenses; this work's multi-architecture approach makes selective data randomization practical for production kernels."
  - title: "Validating JIT Compilers via Compilation Space Exploration"
    authors:
    - Cong Li
    - Yanyan Jiang
    - Chang Xu
    - Zhendong Su
    tldr: "Compilation space exploration systematically generates and tests the large space of valid JIT compilation outcomes to find miscompilation bugs in production JIT compilers."
    why_notable: "JIT correctness is notoriously hard to test; this paper's systematic exploration strategy finds real bugs in widely-used runtimes and advances the state of compiler validation."
  - title: "Freezing-based Memory and Process Co-design for User Experience on Resource-limited Mobile Devices"
    authors:
    - Changlong Li
    - Zongwei Zhu
    - Chun Jason Xue
    - Yu Liang
    - Rachata Ausavarungnirun
    - Liang Shi
    - Xuehai Zhou
    tldr: "A co-designed memory and process management scheme freezes background processes at fine granularity to reclaim memory while preserving fast resume latency on constrained mobile hardware."
    why_notable: "Mobile memory pressure directly degrades user experience; this paper's co-design perspective yields measurable improvements on real devices with limited resources."
  - title: "Analyzing Configuration Dependencies of File Systems"
    authors:
    - Tabassum Mahmud
    - Om Rameshwar Gatla
    - Duo Zhang
    - Carson Love
    - Ryan Bumann
    - Varun S. Girimaji
    - Mai Zheng
    tldr: "This work systematically analyzes the dependency graph among file-system configuration options to reveal hidden interactions that lead to silent data corruption or crashes."
    why_notable: "File-system misconfiguration is a major source of data loss in practice; understanding configuration dependencies is essential for building safer storage systems."
  - title: "Efficient Fault Tolerance for Stateful Serverless Computing with Asymmetric Logging"
    authors:
    - Sheng Qi
    - Haoyu Feng
    - Xuanzhe Liu
    - Xin Jin
    tldr: "Asymmetric logging decouples the logging cost between the fast and slow paths of stateful serverless functions, enabling low-overhead fault tolerance without sacrificing recovery guarantees."
    why_notable: "Fault tolerance for stateful serverless remains an open performance challenge; this paper's asymmetric design significantly reduces logging overhead compared to symmetric approaches."
  - title: "Towards Serialization/Deserialization-free State Transfer in Serverless Workflows"
    authors:
    - Xingda Wei
    - Fangming Lu
    - Zhuobin Huang
    - Rong Chen
    - Mingyu Wu
    - Haibo Chen
    tldr: "This system eliminates serialization and deserialization costs when passing state between serverless functions by enabling direct in-memory state transfer across workflow stages."
    why_notable: "Ser/deser overhead is a dominant cost in serverless workflows; removing it fundamentally changes the performance profile of function chaining at scale."
  - title: "Enabling Anonymous Online Streaming Analytics at the Network Edge"
    authors:
    - Yunming Xiao
    - Yanqi Gu
    - Yibo Zhao
    - Sen Lin
    - Aleksandar Kuzmanovic
    tldr: "This paper designs an edge-based streaming analytics framework that enforces differential privacy while processing high-throughput data streams with low latency."
    why_notable: "Privacy-preserving analytics at the edge is increasingly required by regulation and user expectation; this system shows it can be done at practical streaming throughputs."
  - title: "LCL+: a Lock Chain Length-based Distributed Deadlock Detection and Resolution Service Built for OceanBase"
    authors:
    - Zhenkun Yang
    - Chen Qian
    - Xuwang Teng
    - Fanyu Kong
    - Fusheng Han
    - Quanqing Xu
    - Daokun Hu
    tldr: "LCL+ detects and resolves distributed deadlocks in the OceanBase database by tracking lock-chain lengths across nodes, achieving low overhead with fast detection latency."
    why_notable: "Deadlock detection in large-scale distributed databases is an unsolved production problem; this paper presents a battle-tested algorithm deployed in a major commercial system."