2020/05/19 by Nastaran Hajinazar, Pratyush Patel, Hajinazar, Nastaran +17
Computer Science · #Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques #Cloud Computing and Resource Management #Advanced Data Storage Technologies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2005.09748
Computers continue to diversify with respect to system designs, emerging\nmemory technologies, and application memory demands. Unfortunately, continually\nadapting the conventional virtual memory framework to each possible system\nconfiguration is challenging, and often results in performance loss or requires\nnon-trivial workarounds. To address these challenges, we propose a new virtual\nmemory framework, the Virtual Block Interface (VBI). We design VBI based on the\nkey idea that delegating memory management duties to hardware can reduce the\noverheads and software complexity associated with virtual memory. VBI\nintroduces a set of variable-sized virtual blocks (VBs) to applications. Each\nVB is a contiguous region of the globally-visible VBI address space, and an\napplication can allocate each semantically meaningful unit of information\n(e.g., a data structure) in a separate VB. VBI decouples access protection from\nmemory allocation and address translation. While the OS controls which programs\nhave access to which VBs, dedicated hardware in the memory controller manages\nthe physical memory allocation and address translation of the VBs. This\napproach enables several architectural optimizations to (1) efficiently and\nflexibly cater to different and increasingly diverse system configurations, and\n(2) eliminate key inefficiencies of conventional virtual memory. We demonstrate\nthe benefits of VBI with two important use cases: (1) reducing the overheads of\naddress translation (for both native execution and virtual machine\nenvironments), as VBI reduces the number of translation requests and associated\nmemory accesses; and (2) two heterogeneous main memory architectures, where VBI\nincreases the effectiveness of managing fast memory regions. For both cases,\nVBI significanttly improves performance over conventional virtual memory.\n