Osdi Supplementary

OSDI Supplementary Material

OSDI inverts the supplement habit most authors bring from ML and ACM venues. Rules below are the OSDI '26 cycle (verified 2026-07-08): submissions get 12 pages plus unlimited references and nothing else — the CFP permits extra pages for references "but not for supplementary material in appendices." There is no supplement upload, no appendix, no ZIP. Accepted papers later expand to 14 pages plus references and appendices, plus an optional two-page Artifact Appendix for papers passing artifact evaluation.

The three destinations

Every piece of material has exactly one correct home:

The triage question for any candidate paragraph, proof, table, or figure: "Does a skeptical reviewer need this to accept the paper?" Yes → it earns body space, and something weaker must leave to make room. No → it waits for the final-paper appendix or the artifact, and the body carries a one-line summary of what exists.

Living without an appendix at submission

Techniques for material that would be an appendix elsewhere:

• Proofs and invariants — state the invariant and the proof's one load-bearing step in the body ("safety follows because a lease transfer requires quorum acknowledgment of the epoch bump"); the full proof is final-paper appendix material. If the paper is unacceptable without the full formal argument, OSDI's format is telling you something about venue fit (osdi-topic-selection).
• Extended result grids — the body shows the RQ-answering figure; the sweep across every configuration goes to the artifact as data plus plotting scripts, referenced in one sentence without a link that breaks anonymity.
• Protocol/config detail — compress into a table; systems reviewers extract more from a dense parameter table than from two pages of prose.
• Never point to an external URL as a de facto appendix. An anonymous link carrying material the paper depends on violates the spirit of the rule reviewers enforce, and any non-anonymous link is a double-blind breach (osdi-submission).

Planning the June expansion in December

Write the submission with a marked expansion plan so the accepted version is an unfolding, not a rewrite:

% submission-time annotations, kept in comments in the source
% [FINAL-14pp] restore lease-protocol failure cases cut from §4.2
% [FINAL-APPENDIX-A] full safety proof (draft in proofs/safety.tex)
% [FINAL-APPENDIX-B] full workload sweep grid (artifact: plots/sweep/)
% [ARTIFACT-APPENDIX] runbook skeleton -> becomes the 2-page AE appendix
% rule: nothing in FINAL-* may be load-bearing for acceptance

The rule in the last comment is the audit: if any FINAL-* item is something a reviewer would have needed, it must be promoted into the body now — after acceptance is too late to have convinced anyone, and OSDI '26 offered no response period in which to supply missing material on request.

Triage decision flow

Run each candidate item through this flow when the draft first crosses 12 pages — not on deadline night:

item: proof / table / protocol detail / extra experiment / config dump
  |
  needed by a skeptical reviewer to ACCEPT? --yes--> body (cut something weaker;
  |                                                  osdi-writing-style compression
  no                                                 pass runs first)
  |
  needed by a READER or REPRODUCER later? --yes--> is it prose/math?
  |                                                  yes -> final-paper appendix
  no                                                 no (code/data/runs)
  |                                                       -> artifact
  cut entirely (deadline-week sunk cost is not a reason to keep it)

Two calibration notes: reviewers differ, so when genuinely unsure whether an item is acceptance-critical, it goes in the body — the no-response process gives no chance to supply it on request; and the body must summarize every deferred item in one sentence ("the full sweep, 240 configurations, accompanies the artifact"), because an unmentioned deferral is indistinguishable from a gap.

The Artifact Appendix (the one supplement OSDI formalizes)

For papers that pass artifact evaluation, the final paper may add up to two pages documenting the artifact in a standard format: what the artifact contains, hardware and software requirements, how to reproduce which claims. Treat it as the public, citable interface to the artifact — written from the runbook the AE committee already exercised (osdi-artifact-evaluation), not composed fresh in June.

Triage failure modes

• Submitting a paper that silently assumes appendix space exists — discovered at page 13, two days before the deadline.
• Cutting load-bearing evidence to fit, instead of cutting redundancy (osdi-writing-style's compression pass comes first).
• An external "anonymous supplement" link standing in for the forbidden appendix.
• Deferring so much to the final version that reviewers correctly judge the submission incomplete — conditional acceptance mandates fixes, but only for papers strong enough to conditionally accept.

Output format

[No-appendix compliance] submission = body + refs only? violations: <list>
[Triage table] each deferred item -> destination (final-appendix / artifact) + body summary line present?
[Load-bearing audit] any FINAL-* item a reviewer actually needs? <list or none>
[External links] none that carry evidence / none that break anonymity? yes/no
[June plan] expansion annotations in source? artifact-appendix runbook started?

Source: brycewang-stanford/Awesome-Journal-Skills → OSDI-Skills/skills/osdi-supplementary/SKILL.md