HiPEC: High Performance External Virtual Memory Caching

Traditional operating systems use a xed LRU-like page replacement policy and centralized frame pool that cannot properly serve all types of memory access patterns of various applications. As a result, many memory-intensive applications, such as databases, multimedia applications and scienti c simulators, induce excessive page faults and page replacement when running on top of existing operating systems. This paper presents a High Performance External virtual memory Caching mechanism (HiPEC) to provide applications with their own speci c page replacement management. The user speci c policy, programmedin the HiPEC command set, is stored in user address space. When a page fault occurs, the kernel fetches and interprets the corresponding policy commands to perform the user-speci c page replacement management. Experimental results show that HiPEC induces little overhead and can signi cantly improve performance for memory-intensive applications.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1994
• Where: OSDI
• Authors: Chao-Hsien Lee, Meng Chang Chen, Ruei-Chuan Chang
• Keywords: Operating System, OSDI 1994, Page Replacement, Page Replacement Management, Page Replacement Policy