iBuddy Memory Manager for Multicore Large Memory Systems
Jongmoo Choi, Hee-Kwon Park · 2011
Traditionally, a variety of operating systems make use of the lazy buddy system for managing physical memory. However, we have observed that the lazy buddy system does not go well with the multicore systems equipped with large memory in terms of predictability and performance. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel memory manager, called inverse buddy system, that supports the following two features. First, it manipulates each page frame individually and conducts a downward search allowing a page frame allocation to be done in O(1). The second feature is that it divides physical memory into several buddy spaces, alleviating the lock contentions caused by multiple cores. Performance evaluation results based on an experimental system with 16 cores and 32GB memory have shown that the inverse buddy system can improve the performance of applications by up to 42% with an average of 19%, compared with the lazy buddy system.