The New Costs of Physical Memory Fragmentation
Alexander Halbuer, Illia Ostapyshyn, Lukas Steiner, Lars Wrenger, Matthias Jung, Christian Dietrich, Daniel Lohmann · 2024
External fragmentation is becoming a serious problem again after paging temporarily solved it with its one-size-fits-all 4 KiB approach. The increasing adoption of mixed base, huge, and giant page sizes, DRAM energy-saving techniques, and memory disaggregation, necessitates a memory management system capable of handling larger entities in the range of multiple megabytes up to several gigabytes.