sosp-supplementary

SOSP Supplementary Material

Use this while splitting content between the SOSP paper and its optional supplement. The CFP (2026 cycle, checked 2026-07-08 via sigops.org/s/conferences/sosp/2026/cfp.html and the sosp26.hotcrp.com submission form) allows supplementary material as a separate document uploaded alongside the anonymized PDF. Its charter is narrow: content that supports the paper but is not critical to evaluating it — formal proofs, extra data analyses, methodological detail. Reviewers may open it; nothing obligates them to.

The governing asymmetry

The paper must stand alone inside its 12 pages of technical content. The supplement can only deepen an argument the paper already completes — it cannot carry one. This produces a simple sorting rule for every candidate paragraph, proof, and figure:

The classic failure: page pressure at T-minus-two-weeks pushes the failure-recovery evaluation into the supplement, a reviewer never opens it, and the review reads "no failure experiments." During SOSP's response phase you may point back to the supplement — it was part of the submission — but a pointer in a sub-500-word response is a weak substitute for evidence on the reviewed pages.

Anonymity extends to the supplement

The supplement is reviewed under the same double-blind rules as the paper. It is the more dangerous document because it is assembled last and checked least:

• Appendix LaTeX often still carries \author blocks, acknowledgment stubs, or grant numbers from an earlier tech-report build.
• Extended data tables can leak cluster hostnames, internal project codenames, or usernames embedded in file paths.
• PDF metadata is regenerated at every compile; scrub the supplement's, not only the paper's.

# Run the same leak sweep on the supplement as on the paper
pdfinfo supplement.pdf | grep -iE '^(author|creator)'
pdftotext supplement.pdf - | grep -inE 'acknowledg|grant|@[a-z-]+\.(edu|com)|/home/[a-z]|corp\.' | head
# Cross-check: every paper reference to the supplement resolves
pdftotext main.pdf - | grep -oE 'supplement[a-z]* (§|Section |Appendix )?[A-Z0-9.]*' | sort -u

Supplement, artifact, and appendix are three different objects

Teams routinely conflate three artifacts with different clocks and audiences:

1. Supplementary document — submitted with the paper in April, anonymized, read (maybe) by paper reviewers. Governed by this skill.
2. Artifact package — prepared after acceptance for the sysartifacts evaluation, non-anonymous, exercised by a separate committee (see sosp-artifact-evaluation). Do not burn April effort polishing container images no paper reviewer will run.
3. Camera-ready appendix — final papers get 13 pages (14 with shepherd approval), so some supplement content may graduate into the paper itself after acceptance (see sosp-camera-ready).

Plan the April supplement knowing routes 2 and 3 exist: its only job is to survive review, not to be the archival record of everything you know.

Structuring for a skimming reviewer

A SOSP reviewer opening the supplement is looking for one specific thing mid-review. Optimize for that entry pattern:

• Open with a half-page map: each supplement section, one line on what it adds, and which paper section or claim it backs.
• Number supplement sections to continue or clearly reference the paper's numbering, and cite them from the paper precisely ("full proof in supplement §B.2"), never as a bare "see supplement."
• Keep each section self-contained enough to read without the neighboring ones; a reviewer chasing the proof of Invariant I2 should not need supplement §A first.

Output format

[Split audit] review-critical content found in supplement? <list or none>
[Paper -> supplement pointers] all resolve? <broken refs>
[Anonymity] supplement metadata + text sweep result
[Confusion check] AE-only material mistakenly built now? camera-ready graduation list?
[Map] supplement sections -> paper claims they back
[Fix order] <moves before the upload>