Fast, Transparent Filesystem Microkernel Recovery with Ananke

This conference talk from USENIX FAST '25 presents Ananke, a high-performance filesystem microkernel service that provides transparent recovery from unexpected filesystem failures. Learn how Ananke leverages microkernel architecture to run recovery code coordinated by the host OS when a process crashes, recording critical information not typically available during full-system crash recovery. Discover how this approach enables fast and transparent recovery for applications, with the researchers demonstrating lossless recovery through over 30,000 fault-injection experiments, typically recovering in just a few hundred milliseconds. The presentation, which won the Best Paper award, also shows how Ananke maintains high performance during normal operation with minimal overhead for fault detection and recovery preparation. The talk features authors Jing Liu from Microsoft Research along with Yifan Dai, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.