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Article

Practical, transparent operating system support for superpages

Authors:

Peter Druschel,

Alan CoxAuthors Info & Claims

OSDI '02: Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Operating systems design and implementation (Copyright restrictions prevent ACM from being able to make the PDFs for this conference available for downloading)

Pages 89 - 104

Published: 09 December 2002 Publication History

Abstract

Most general-purpose processors provide support for memory pages of large sizes, called superpages. Superpages enable each entry in the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) to map a large physical memory region into a virtual address space. This dramatically increases TLB coverage, reduces TLB misses, and promises performance improvements for many applications. However, supporting superpages poses several challenges to the operating system, in terms of superpage allocation and promotion tradeoffs, fragmentation control, etc. We analyze these issues, and propose the design of an effective superpage management system. We implement it in FreeBSD on the Alpha CPU, and evaluate it on real workloads and benchmarks. We obtain substantial performance benefits, often exceeding 30%; these benefits are sustained even under stressful workload scenarios.

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Cited By

Gosakan KHan JKuszmaul WMubarek IMukherjee NSriram KTagliavini GWest EBender MBhattacharjee AConway AFarach-Colton MGandhi JJohnson RKannan SPorter DAamodt TJerger NSwift M(2023)Mosaic Pages: Big TLB Reach with Small PagesProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 310.1145/3582016.3582021(433-448)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3582016.3582021
Chen DTong DYang CYi JCheng X(2023)FlexPointer: Fast Address Translation Based on Range TLB and Tagged PointersACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization10.1145/357985420:2(1-24)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579854
Gupta SBhattacharyya AOh YBhattacharjee AFalsafi BPayer MMartínez JDuato JJohn L(2021)Rebooting virtual memory with midgardProceedings of the 48th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture10.1109/ISCA52012.2021.00047(512-525)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ISCA52012.2021.00047
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Practical, transparent operating system support for superpages
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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

OSDI '02: Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Operating systems design and implementation (Copyright restrictions prevent ACM from being able to make the PDFs for this conference available for downloading)

December 2002

413 pages

ISBN:9781450301114

Program Chairs:
David Culler
University of California, Berkeley
,
Peter Druschel
Rice University

Sponsors

SIGOPS: ACM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems

Publisher

USENIX Association

United States

Publication History

Published: 09 December 2002

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Cited By

Gosakan KHan JKuszmaul WMubarek IMukherjee NSriram KTagliavini GWest EBender MBhattacharjee AConway AFarach-Colton MGandhi JJohnson RKannan SPorter DAamodt TJerger NSwift M(2023)Mosaic Pages: Big TLB Reach with Small PagesProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 310.1145/3582016.3582021(433-448)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3582016.3582021
Chen DTong DYang CYi JCheng X(2023)FlexPointer: Fast Address Translation Based on Range TLB and Tagged PointersACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization10.1145/357985420:2(1-24)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3579854
Gupta SBhattacharyya AOh YBhattacharjee AFalsafi BPayer MMartínez JDuato JJohn L(2021)Rebooting virtual memory with midgardProceedings of the 48th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture10.1109/ISCA52012.2021.00047(512-525)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ISCA52012.2021.00047
Zhu WCox ARixner SGavrilovska AZadok E(2020)A comprehensive analysis of superpage management mechanisms and policiesProceedings of the 2020 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/3489146.3489203(829-842)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3489146.3489203
Li XLiu LYang SPeng LQiu J(2019)Thinking about A New Mechanism for Huge Page ManagementProceedings of the 10th ACM SIGOPS Asia-Pacific Workshop on Systems10.1145/3343737.3343745(40-46)Online publication date: 19-Aug-2019
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Ren XRodrigues KChen LVega CStumm MYuan DBrecht TWilliamson C(2019)An analysis of performance evolution of Linux's core operationsProceedings of the 27th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles10.1145/3341301.3359640(554-569)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2019
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Michailidis TDelis ARoussopoulos MHershcovitch MGoel AMorrison A(2019)MEGAProceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference on Systems and Storage10.1145/3319647.3325839(121-131)Online publication date: 22-May-2019
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Choi GSon JChoi JCho SWon YHung CPapadopoulos G(2019)HPanalProceedings of the 34th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3297280.3297425(1438-1443)Online publication date: 8-Apr-2019
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Panwar APrasad AGopinath K(2018)Making Huge Pages Actually UsefulACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3296957.317320353:2(679-692)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2018
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Ausavarungnirun RLandgraf JMiller VGhose SGandhi JRossbach CMutlu O(2018)MosaicACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review10.1145/3273982.327398652:1(27-44)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2018
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