Making the common case the only case with anticipatory memory allocation

  • Authors:

  • Swaminathan Sundararaman;Yupu Zhang;Sriram Subramanian;Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau;Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau

  • Affiliations:

  • Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison;Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison;Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison;Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison;Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison

  • Venue:
  • FAST'11 Proceedings of the 9th USENIX conference on File and stroage technologies
  • Year:
  • 2011

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.02

Visualization

Abstract

We present Anticipatory Memory Allocation (AMA), a newmethod to build kernel code that is robust to memory-allocation failures. AMA avoids the usual difficulties in handling allocation failures through a novel combination of static and dynamic techniques. Specifically, a developer, with assistance from AMA static analysis tools, determines how much memory a particular call into a kernel subsystem will need, and then pre-allocates said amount immediately upon entry to the kernel; subsequent allocation requests are serviced from the pre-allocated pool and thus guaranteed never to fail. We describe the static and run-time components of AMA, and then present a thorough evaluation of Linux ext2-mfr, a case study in which we transform the Linux ext2 file system into a memory-failure robust version of itself. Experiments reveal that ext2-mfr avoids memory-allocation failures successfully while incurring little space or time overhead.