A method to extend available main memory for computer systems
Xiaoran Hao, Lan Chen, Mao Ni, Lei Pan · 2021
In operating systems, swapping mechanism provides extended main memory space for memory-intensive applications. However, page-granularity swapping causes extra system I/O when objects are smaller than a page. This paper uses NAND flash-based SSD to extend DRAM main memory, and proposes an object-granularity hybrid main memory management scheme to reduce extra system I/O by caching as many hot objects as possible in DRAM. Compared to Linux-swap system, the proposed memory management scheme improves system performance by up to 47.5% for microbenchmarks and 73.3% for real-world memory-intensive workloads.