Transient Overloads Control Mechanism for Virtual Memory System
Young-Woong Go, Jae Yong Lee, Cheol-Ho Hong, Hyukc Yu · The KIPS Transactions PartA · 2001
In virtual memory system, when a process attempts to access a page that is not resident in memory, the system generates and handles a page fault that causes unpredictable delay. So virtual memory system is not appropriate for the real-time system, because it can increase the deadline miss ratio of real-time task. In multimedia system, virtual memory system may degrade the QoS(quality of service) of multimedia application. Furthermore, in general-purpose operating system, whenever a new task is dynamically loaded, virtual memory system suffers from extensive page fault that cause transient overloading state. In this paper, we present efficient overloading control mechanism called RBPFH (Rate-Based Page Fault Handling). A significant feature of the RBPFH algorithm is page fault dispersion that keeps page fault ratio from exceeding available bound by monitoring current system resources. Furthermore, whenever the amount of available system resource is changed, the RBPFH algorithm dynamically adjusts the page fault handling rate. The RBPFH algorithm is implemented in the Linux operating system and its performance measured. The results demonstrate RBPFH\`s superior performance in supporting multimedia applications. Experiment result shows that RBPFH could achieve 10%∼20% reduction in deadline miss ratio and 50%∼60% reduction in average delay.