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Revisiting memory management on virtualized environments

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Yingwei LuoAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO), Volume 10, Issue 4

Article No.: 48, Pages 1 - 20

https://doi.org/10.1145/2541228.2555304

Published: 01 December 2013 Publication History

Abstract

With the evolvement of hardware, 64-bit Central Processing Units (CPUs) and 64-bit Operating Systems (OSs) have dominated the market. This article investigates the performance of virtual memory management of Virtual Machines (VMs) with a large virtual address space in 64-bit OSs, which imposes different pressure on memory virtualization than 32-bit systems. Each of the two conventional memory virtualization approaches, Shadowing Paging (SP) and Hardware-Assisted Paging (HAP), causes different overhead for different applications. Our experiments show that 64-bit applications prefer to run in a VM using SP, while 32-bit applications do not have a uniform preference between SP and HAP. In this article, we trace this inconsistency between 32-bit applications and 64-bit applications to its root cause through a systematic empirical study in Linux systems and discover that the major overhead of SP results from memory management in the 32-bit GNU C library (glibc). We propose enhancements to the existing memory management algorithms, which substantially reduce the overhead of SP. Based on the evaluations using SPEC CPU2006, Parsec 2.1, and cloud benchmarks, our results show that SP, with the improved memory allocators, can compete with HAP in almost all cases, in both 64-bit and 32-bit systems. We conclude that without a significant breakthrough in HAP, researchers should pay more attention to SP, which is more flexible and cost effective.

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Cited By

Altenbernd PGustafsson JLisper BStappert F(2016)Early execution time-estimation through automatically generated timing modelsReal-Time Systems10.1007/s11241-016-9250-752:6(731-760)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11241-016-9250-7
Chang HChang YKuo TLi HMarculescu DLiu F(2015)A Light-Weighted Software-Controlled Cache for PCM-based Main Memory SystemsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design10.5555/2840819.2840823(22-29)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2840819.2840823
Wang ZTournavitis GFranke BO'boyle M(2014)Integrating profile-driven parallelism detection and machine-learning-based mappingACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization10.1145/257956111:1(1-26)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2579561
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Revisiting memory management on virtualized environments
1. Information systems
  1. Information storage systems
    1. Storage management
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software organization and properties
    1. Contextual software domains
      1. Operating systems
        File systems management
        Memory management

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization

ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization Volume 10, Issue 4

December 2013

1046 pages

ISSN:1544-3566

EISSN:1544-3973

DOI:10.1145/2541228

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 01 December 2013

Accepted: 01 November 2013

Revised: 01 November 2013

Received: 01 June 2013

Published in TACO Volume 10, Issue 4

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Cited By

Altenbernd PGustafsson JLisper BStappert F(2016)Early execution time-estimation through automatically generated timing modelsReal-Time Systems10.1007/s11241-016-9250-752:6(731-760)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s11241-016-9250-7
Chang HChang YKuo TLi HMarculescu DLiu F(2015)A Light-Weighted Software-Controlled Cache for PCM-based Main Memory SystemsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design10.5555/2840819.2840823(22-29)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2840819.2840823
Wang ZTournavitis GFranke BO'boyle M(2014)Integrating profile-driven parallelism detection and machine-learning-based mappingACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization10.1145/257956111:1(1-26)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2579561
Chen PWang CLi XZhou X(2014)Accelerating the next generation long read mapping with the FPGA-based systemIEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics10.1109/TCBB.2014.232687611:5(840-852)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TCBB.2014.2326876

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