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We present Aquifer, the first system to serve MicroVM snapshots from a hierarchical CXL+RDMA memory pool. A characterization of snapshot images reveals that the vast majority of pages are either zero or cold, enabling a hotness-based snapshot format that eliminates zero pages and places only the hot working set in the CXL pool while storing cold pages in the RDMA pool. Sharing these snapshots across hosts on CXL 2.0 multi-headed devices, which lack hardware cache coherence, requires Aquifer's ownership-based coherence protocol to ensure correctness. Finally, Aquifer uses a copy-based page serving mechanism pre-installs hot pages from CXL memory before MicroVM resume and demand-pages cold pages asynchronously from RDMA. On emulated CXL+RDMA hardware, Aquifer achieves a 2.2x geometric-mean speedup in end-to-end invocation time over Firecracker and 1.1x over the next best alternative.
From: Junliang Hu [view email]
[v1]
Tue, 23 Jun 2026 02:47:34 UTC (587 KB)
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