Accelerating Page Migrations in Operating Systems With Intel DSA
Jongho Baik, Jonghyeon Kim, Chang Hyun Park, Jeongseob Ahn · IEEE Computer Architecture Letters · 2025
Modern server-class CPUs are introducing special-purpose accelerators on the same chip to improve performance and efficiency for data-intensive applications. This paper presents a case for accelerating data migrations in operating systems with the Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA), a new feature by Intel. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that exploits a hardware-assisted data migration scheme in the operating system. We identify which Linux kernel components can benefit from the hardware acceleration, particularly focusing on the kernel subsystems that rely on themigrate_pages()kernel function. As the hardware accelerator is not suitable for transferring a small amount of data due to the HW setup overhead, this preliminary study concentrates on the design and implementation of acceleratingmigrate_pages()with DSA. We prototype a DSA-enabled Linux kernel and evaluate its effectiveness through two benchmarks demonstrating real-world page compaction (kcompactd) and promotion (kdamond) scenarios. In both cases, our prototype demonstrates improved throughput in page migration, benefiting both the kernel subsystem and applications.