P2Cache: Enhancing Data-Centric Applications via Application-Guided Management of OS Page Caches
Dusol Lee, Inhyuk Choi, Chanyoung Lee, Hyungsoo Jung, Jihong Kim · ACM Transactions on Storage · 2025
Data-centric applications perform tasks that require intensive data processing and ample memory resources. These tasks have varying I/O access patterns, significantly impacted by the OS cache. Therefore, it is desirable to enable application-specific cache management without compromising memory efficiency. However, infusing user-level policies into the OS cache management is challenging because it is difficult to communicate application-level I/O semantics and access patterns to general-purpose OSs. This article addresses the challenge by enabling applications to safely convey their I/O semantics to OSs via eBPF, allowing for more application-specific control over the OS cache. To this end, we introduce P2Cache , a programmable OS page cache. P2Cache extends the Linux page cache with three new probe points (i.e., eviction , prefetching , and swapping ) that can support application-directed custom policies on OS cache management using eBPF programs. Our experimental results showed that P2Cache significantly enhanced the performance of an LLM inference, a graph processing application, and a database by up to 230%, 49%, and 18%, respectively, with minimal effort.