Squeezy accelerates VM memory reclamation for serverless FaaS

The authors of the paper “Squeezy: Rapid VM Memory Reclamation for Serverless Functions” propose a new OS-level mechanism to accelerate memory hot(un)plug for VM-sandboxed FaaS workloads.

• Squeezy is implemented as an extension to the Linux v6.6 memory manager, segregating hotplugged memory regions from regular VM memory to bound allocation lifetimes and enable sub-second reclamation of multiple GiBs of memory under realistic FaaS load, with order-of-magnitude faster performance and bounded tail latency compared to state-of-the-art.
• The work targets VM-sandboxed serverless functions in FaaS environments, addressing the long reclamation latencies and CPU overheads of existing memory hot(un)plug mechanisms by making the OS memory manager aware of hotplugged memory, and is published on arXiv with DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2411.12893 by researchers from National Technical University Of Athens and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.