(Guest Lecture) TA’s Journey of Solving OS Research Questions

This guest lecture walks through a systems-research journey from distributed tracing in user space to debugging invisible kernel- and hardware-level bottlenecks in microservices, highlighting why request context is lost at kernel boundaries and how that limits cross-layer diagnosis. The talk compares three context-propagation approaches—extra syscalls, eBPF-based propagation/maps/ring buffers, and customized syscall hooks inspired by Zpoline—and discusses their trade-offs in overhead, maintainability, and observability, with the practical takeaway that efficient context propagation plus low-overhead kernel-to-user data paths are key to scalable vertical tracing. Slides: TA’s journey of solving OS research questions.