Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems

Since the inception of computing, we have been reliant on CPU-powered architectures. However, today this reliance is challenged by manufacturing limitations (CMOS … (More)

In recent years, an increasing number of hardware devices started providing programming interfaces to developers such as smart NICs. Processor vendors use microcode to … (More)

Our CPUs contain a compute instruction set, which regular applications use. But they also feature an intricate underworld of different CPU modes, combined with trap and … (More)

Events that take 10s to 100s of ns like cache misses increasingly cause CPU stalls. However, hiding the latency of these events is challenging: hardware mechanisms suffer from the … (More)

While systems designers are increasingly turning to hardware accelerators for performance gains, realizing these gains is painstaking and error-prone. It can take several … (More)

The immense hardware complexity of modern computers, both mobile phones and datacenter servers, is a seemingly endless source of bugs and vulnerabilities in system software.

Memory prefetching improves performance across many systems layers. However, achieving high prefetch accuracy with low overhead is challenging, as memory hierarchies and … (More)

Storage capacity demand is projected to grow exponentially in the coming decade and so will its contribution to the overall carbon footprint of computing devices. In recent years, … (More)

Modern cloud platforms have been employing hardware accelerators such as neural processing units (NPUs) to meet the increasing demand for computing resources for AI-based … (More)

Shell scripts are critical infrastructure for developers, administrators, and scientists; and ought to enjoy the performance benefits of the full suite of advances in compiler … (More)

When writing a distributed application, conventional wisdom says to split your application into separate services that can be rolled out independently. This approach … (More)

Emerging memory fabrics and the resulting composable infrastructures have fundamentally challenged our conventional wisdom on how to build efficient rack/cluster-scale … (More)

Memory is the bottleneck resource in today's datacenters because it is inflexible: low-priority processes are routinely killed to free up resources during memory pressure. This wastes … (More)

BPF support in Linux has made kernel extensions easier. Recent efforts have shown that using BPF to offload portions of server applications, e.g., memcached and service proxies, can … (More)

The emergence of verified eBPF bytecode is ushering in a new era of safe kernel extensions. In this paper, we argue that eBPF's verifier---the source of its safety … (More)

Verified systems software has generally had to assume the correctness of the operating system and its provided services (like networking and the file system). Even though there exist … (More)

With full resource disaggregation on the horizon, it is unclear what the most suitable programming model is that enables dataflow developers to fully harvest the potential that recent … (More)

Today's clouds are inefficient: their utilization of resources like CPUs, GPUs, memory, and storage is low. This inefficiency occurs because applications consume resources at … (More)

Intra-host networks, including heterogeneous devices and interconnect fabrics, have become increasingly complex and crucial. However, intra-host networks today do not provide … (More)

Confidential cloud computing enables cloud tenants to distrust their service provider. Achieving confidential computing solutions that provide concrete security guarantees … (More)

Software is going through a trust crisis. Privileged code is no longer trusted and processes insufficiently protect user code from unverified libraries. While usually treated … (More)