research-article

Page overlays: an enhanced virtual memory framework to enable fine-grained memory management

Authors:

Vivek Seshadri,

Gennady Pekhimenko,

Olatunji Ruwase,

Phillip B. Gibbons,

Michael A. Kozuch,

Trishul ChilimbiAuthors Info & Claims

ISCA '15: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture

Pages 79 - 91

https://doi.org/10.1145/2749469.2750379

Published: 13 June 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Many recent works propose mechanisms demonstrating the potential advantages of managing memory at a fine (e.g., cache line) granularity---e.g., fine-grained deduplication and fine-grained memory protection. Unfortunately, existing virtual memory systems track memory at a larger granularity (e.g., 4 KB pages), inhibiting efficient implementation of such techniques. Simply reducing the page size results in an unacceptable increase in page table overhead and TLB pressure.

We propose a new virtual memory framework that enables efficient implementation of a variety of fine-grained memory management techniques. In our framework, each virtual page can be mapped to a structure called a page overlay, in addition to a regular physical page. An overlay contains a subset of cache lines from the virtual page. Cache lines that are present in the overlay are accessed from there and all other cache lines are accessed from the regular physical page. Our page-overlay framework enables cache-line-granularity memory management without significantly altering the existing virtual memory framework or introducing high overheads.

We show that our framework can enable simple and efficient implementations of seven memory management techniques, each of which has a wide variety of applications. We quantitatively evaluate the potential benefits of two of these techniques: overlay-on-write and sparse-data-structure computation. Our evaluations show that overlay-on-write, when applied to fork, can improve performance by 15% and reduce memory capacity requirements by 53% on average compared to traditional copy-on-write. For sparse data computation, our framework can outperform a state-of-the-art software-based sparse representation on a number of real-world sparse matrices. Our framework is general, powerful, and effective in enabling fine-grained memory management at low cost.

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Schwedock BBeckmann N(2024)Leviathan: A Unified System for General-Purpose Near-Data Computing2024 57th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)10.1109/MICRO61859.2024.00095(1278-1294)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2024
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Hildenbrand DSchulz MAmit NAamodt TJerger NSwift M(2023)Copy-on-Pin: The Missing Piece for Correct Copy-on-WriteProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 210.1145/3575693.3575716(176-191)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2023
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Vijaykumar NOlgun AKanellopoulos KBostanci FHassan HLotfi MGibbons PMutlu O(2022)MetaSys: A Practical Open-source Metadata Management System to Implement and Evaluate Cross-layer OptimizationsACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization10.1145/350525019:2(1-29)Online publication date: 24-Mar-2022
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Index Terms

Page overlays: an enhanced virtual memory framework to enable fine-grained memory management
1. Hardware
  1. Hardware validation
  2. Integrated circuits
    1. Semiconductor memory
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        Memory management
        Virtual memory

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cover image ACM Conferences

ISCA '15: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture

June 2015

768 pages

ISBN:9781450334020

DOI:10.1145/2749469

General Chair:
Debbie Marr
Intel
,
Program Chair:
David Albonesi
Cornell

ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News Volume 43, Issue 3S
ISCA'15
June 2015
745 pages
ISSN:0163-5964
DOI:10.1145/2872887
Editor:
Doug DeGroot
acm dot org
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Published: 13 June 2015

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https://doi.org/10.1109/MICRO61859.2024.00095
Hildenbrand DSchulz MAmit NAamodt TJerger NSwift M(2023)Copy-on-Pin: The Missing Piece for Correct Copy-on-WriteProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 210.1145/3575693.3575716(176-191)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3575693.3575716
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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3505250
Wang ZChoo CKozuch MMowry TPekhimenko GSeshadri VSkarlatos D(2021)NVOverlay: Enabling Efficient and Scalable High-Frequency Snapshotting to NVM2021 ACM/IEEE 48th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA)10.1109/ISCA52012.2021.00046(498-511)Online publication date: Jun-2021
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Chen SChen TChang YWei HShih W(2020)A Partial Page Cache Strategy for NVRAM-Based Storage DevicesIEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems10.1109/TCAD.2018.288704539:2(373-386)Online publication date: Feb-2020
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