--- title: TOCS 2025 Digest venue: TOCS year: 2025 date: '2025-01-01' tags: [] paper_count: 10 draft: false --- 10 papers selected. --- ### Whole-system Persistence Made Efficient with Tree-structured Checkpointing on Microkernel *Mingkai Dong, Fangnuo Wu, Gequan Mo, Haibo Chen* **TL;DR** — 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. --- ### XpuTEE: A High-Performance and Practical Heterogeneous Trusted Execution Environment for GPUs *Shulin Fan, Zhichao Hua, Yubin Xia, Haibo Chen* **TL;DR** — 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. --- ### RegVault II: Achieving Hardware-Assisted Selective Kernel Data Randomization for Multiple Architectures *Ruorong Guo, Yangye Zhou, Jinyan Xu, Wenbo Shen *et al.** **TL;DR** — 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. --- ### Validating JIT Compilers via Compilation Space Exploration *Cong Li, Yanyan Jiang, Chang Xu, Zhendong Su* **TL;DR** — 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. --- ### Freezing-based Memory and Process Co-design for User Experience on Resource-limited Mobile Devices *Changlong Li, Zongwei Zhu, Chun Jason Xue, Yu Liang *et al.** **TL;DR** — 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. --- ### Analyzing Configuration Dependencies of File Systems *Tabassum Mahmud, Om Rameshwar Gatla, Duo Zhang, Carson Love *et al.** **TL;DR** — 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. --- ### Efficient Fault Tolerance for Stateful Serverless Computing with Asymmetric Logging *Sheng Qi, Haoyu Feng, Xuanzhe Liu, Xin Jin* **TL;DR** — 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. --- ### Towards Serialization/Deserialization-free State Transfer in Serverless Workflows *Xingda Wei, Fangming Lu, Zhuobin Huang, Rong Chen *et al.** **TL;DR** — 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. --- ### Enabling Anonymous Online Streaming Analytics at the Network Edge *Yunming Xiao, Yanqi Gu, Yibo Zhao, Sen Lin *et al.** **TL;DR** — 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. --- ### LCL+: a Lock Chain Length-based Distributed Deadlock Detection and Resolution Service Built for OceanBase *Zhenkun Yang, Chen Qian, Xuwang Teng, Fanyu Kong *et al.** **TL;DR** — 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.