PhoenixOS: Concurrent OS-level GPU Checkpoint and Restore with Validated Speculation
Xingda Wei, Zhuobin Huang, Tianle Sun, Yingyi Hao, Rong Chen, Mingcong Han, Jinyu Gu, Haibo Chen · 2025
PhoenixOS (PhOS) is the first OS service that can concurrently checkpoint and restore (C/R) GPU processes—a fundamental capability for critical tasks such as fault tolerance, process migration, and fast startup. While concurrent C/R is well-established on CPUs, it poses unique challenges on GPUs due to their lack of essential features for efficiently tracing concurrent memory reads and writes, such as specific hardware capabilities (e.g., dirty bits) and OS-mediated data paths (e.g., copy-on-write).