MARB: Bridge the Semantic Gap between Operating System and Application Memory Access Behavior

Abstract

The virtual memory subsystem (VMS) is a long-standing and integral part of an operating system (OS). It plays a vital role in enabling remote memory systems over fast data center networks and is promising in terms of transparency and generality. Specifically, these systems use three VMS mechanisms: demand paging, page swapping, and page prefetching. However, the VMS inherent data path is costly, which takes a huge toll on performance. Despite prior efforts to propose page swapping and prefetching algorithms to minimize the occurrences of the data path, they still fall short due to the semantic gap between the OS and applications - the VMS has limited knowledge of its running applications' memory access behaviors. In this paper, orthogonal to prior efforts, we take a fundamen-tally different approach by building an efficient framework to collect full memory access traces at the local bus, and make them available to the OS through CPU cache. Consequently, the page swapping and page prefetching can use this trace to make better decisions, thereby improving the overall performance of systems. We implement a proof-of-concept prototype on commodity x86 servers using a hardware-based memory tracking tool. To show-case our framework's benefits, we integrate it with a state-of-the-art remote memory system and the default kernel page eviction subsystem. Our evaluation shows promising improvements.