On management of free space in compressed memory systems
SIGMETRICS '99 Proceedings of the 1999 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Parallel compression with cooperative dictionary construction
DCC '96 Proceedings of the Conference on Data Compression
Performance of Hardware Compressed Main Memory
HPCA '01 Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture
The case for compressed caching in virtual memory systems
ATEC '99 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
Memory expansion technology (MXT): software support and performance
IBM Journal of Research and Development
Compiler-Guided data compression for reducing memory consumption of embedded applications
ASP-DAC '06 Proceedings of the 2006 Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference
When physical is not real enough
Proceedings of the 11th workshop on ACM SIGOPS European workshop
Improving disk bandwidth-bound applications through main memory compression
MEDEA '07 Proceedings of the 2007 workshop on MEmory performance: DEaling with Applications, systems and architecture
SWAT '08 Proceedings of the 11th Scandinavian workshop on Algorithm Theory
Using data compression for increasing memory system utilization
IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems
Morphable memory system: a robust architecture for exploiting multi-level phase change memories
Proceedings of the 37th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
A software reproduction of virtual memory for deeply embedded systems
ICCSA'06 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Computational Science and Its Applications - Volume Part I
Compressed swapping for NAND flash memory based embedded systems
SAMOS'05 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Embedded Computer Systems: architectures, Modeling, and Simulation
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A new memory subsystem, called Memory Xpansion Technology (MXT), has been built for compressing main memory contents. MXT effectively doubles the physically available memory transparently to the CPUs, input/output devices, device drivers, and application software. An average compression ratio of two or greater has been observed for many applications. Since compressibility of memory contents varies dynamically, the size of the memory managed by the operating system is not fixed. In this paper, we describe operating system techniques that can deal with such dynamically changing memory sizes. We also demonstrate the performance impact of memory compression using the SPEC CPU2000 and SPECweb99 benchmarks. Results show that the hardware compression of memory has a negligible performance penalty compared to a standard memory for many applications. For memory starved applications and benchmarks such as SPECweb99, memory compression improves the performance significantly. Results also show that the memory contents of many applications can be compressed, usually by a factor of two to one.