UBC Computer Science debuts 2 papers at top operating systems conference

New papers on live virtual machine introspection and data center memory management policies will be presented at USENIX OSDI 

UBC Computer Science will be presenting two papers at the 20th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI ‘26), which takes place from July 13-15, 2026 in Seattle, Washington. OSDI is a leading operating systems conference for academic and industry researchers to gather and discuss the design, implementation and implications of systems software.  

The following two papers will be presented at the conference: 

Inside Out: A Paradigm Shift in VM Introspection 
Dufy Teguia, Louis Duval, Teo Pisenti, Kahina Lazri, Daniel Hagimont, Thomas Pasquier, Renaud Lachaize, Alain Tchana 

In this paper, researchers present a new framework for live virtual machine introspection that is efficient, scalable, and safe. While current techniques to analyzing virtual machines can detect attacks, maintain availability and understand performance, they often pause the virtual machine, which is costly and can slow down the process. The new framework, GOODKIT, collocates observers with the virtual machine manager and was found to outperform existing approaches such as LibVMI by large margins across different scenarios.  

MDK: Rethinking the Data Center Memory Reclamation Problem 
Shaurya Patel, Suli Yang, Yawen Wang, Kan Wu, Alexandra (Sasha) Fedorova, Margo Seltzer, Kimberly Keeton 

With current energy demands and severe memory chip shortages, scaling data center resources is becoming more difficult. Unlike traditional memory management in operating systems, managing memory in data centers requires a different approach and set of tools. In collaboration with Google, the researchers present Memory Designer’s Kit (MDK), a new framework for designing and evaluating data center memory management policies. By applying their new optimal policy, they quantified a significant opportunity to improve memory savings over Google’s production baseline.