A fresh look at memory hierarchy management

Chapin, John

doi:10.1109/hotos.1997.595195

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

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“…Similarly, in a system under memory pressure, process prioritization done only through CPU scheduling can become ineffective. Chapin identified the prioritization problem due to lack of memory isolation in operating systems, and motivated the concept of memory prioritization [6].…”

Section: Process Memory Allocationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Path

Azimi

Soares

Stumm

et al. 2007

Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Memory Management

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Traditionally, operating systems use a coarse approximation of memory accesses to implement memory management algorithms by monitoring page faults or scanning page table entries. With finer-grained memory access information, however, the operating system can manage memory much more effectively. Previous work has proposed the use of a software mechanism based on virtual page protection and soft faults to track page accesses at finer granularity. In this paper, we show that while this approach is effective for some applications, for many others it results in an unacceptably high overhead.We propose simple Page Access Tracking Hardware (PATH) to provide accurate page access information to the operating system. The suggested hardware support is generic and can be used by various memory management algorithms. In this paper, we show how the information generated by PATH can be used to implement (i) adaptive page replacement policies, (ii) smart process memory allocation to improve performance or to provide isolation and better process prioritization, and (iii) effectively prefetch virtual memory pages when applications have non-trivial memory access patterns. Our simulation results show that these algorithms can dramatically improve performance (up to 500%) with PATH-provided information, especially when the system is under memory pressure. We show that the software overhead of processing PATH information is less than 6% across the applications we examined (less than 3% in all but two applications), which is at least an order of magnitude less than the overhead of existing software approaches.

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Section: Process Memory Allocationmentioning

confidence: 99%