Garbage collection in an uncooperative environment
Software—Practice & Experience
Combining generational and conservative garbage collection: framework and implementations
POPL '90 Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
Using lifetime predictors to improve memory allocation performance
PLDI '93 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1993 conference on Programming language design and implementation
Surpassing the TLB performance of superpages with less operating system support
ASPLOS VI Proceedings of the sixth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
The design and implementation of the 4.4BSD operating system
The design and implementation of the 4.4BSD operating system
Increasing TLB reach using superpages backed by shadow memory
Proceedings of the 25th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Communications of the ACM
A note on storage fragmentation and program segmentation
Communications of the ACM
2Q: A Low Overhead High Performance Buffer Management Replacement Algorithm
VLDB '94 Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases
Understanding the Linux Virtual Memory Manager
Understanding the Linux Virtual Memory Manager
Transparent operating system support for superpages
Transparent operating system support for superpages
Upper bound for defragmenting buddy heaps
LCTES '05 Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED conference on Languages, compilers, and tools for embedded systems
Performance characteristics of explicit superpage support
ISCA'10 Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on Computer Architecture
kMemvisor: flexible system wide memory mirroring in virtual environments
Proceedings of the 22nd international symposium on High-performance parallel and distributed computing
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Today, many modern processors support more than one page size. The larger pages, called superpages, have been identified as one means of reducing the time spent servicing translation lookaside buffer (TLB) misses in the early 1990s by increasing TLB reach. Widespread usage of superpages has been limited by the requirement that superpages consist of physically contiguous and naturally-aligned small pages. This makes external fragmentation a serious problem for an operating system, one that is almost non-existent when processes use only one page size. Hardware solutions to mitigate this limitation such as sub-blocking, shadow page-tables and a variety of hybrid solutions have not seen wide-spread adoption. This has curtailed automatic superpage support as it is known that superpage availability will decrease during the system's lifetime as external fragmentation grows. This paper presents a placement policy for an operating system's physical page allocator to mitigate external fragmentation problems by grouping pages based on the system's ability to relocate the data. Secondly, the necessary changes to the page reclamation algorithm for it to be contiguity-aware are described while minimising impact to the reclamation algorithms' normal decisions. The performance impact on different machine types is illustrated and it is shown that the superpage allocation success rate is improved. These mechanisms are complementary to any of the hardware solutions proposed in the past.