Rethinking Process Snapshots for Near-Warm Serverless Cold Starts
Talkat 20th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI '26) · 2026-07-13..07-15·
summary
Implements a kernel-side restore path called Spice that adds a new mapping type and file format: SHELF format plus a spliceVMA kernel primitive and a re-exec syscall to bulk-map discontiguous snapshot pages, prefetch working sets into private pools, and install page table entries in parallel. Prototype is a ~7k‑line Linux module and Junction-based userspace shim. Restores run in 0.6–18 ms (vs. 3.6–1197 ms) and cut end-to-end latency by 7.5× (process) and 9.5× (VM) on FunctionBench.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Serverless cold starts
- 1:45Snapshot restore latency
- 3:51Working set prefetching
- 6:40File-backed mappings limits
- 7:21Splice for snapshots
- 10:47Splice execution flow
- 12:54Evaluating Splice
- 13:58Conclusion and open source
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