GISP: A Transparent Superpage Support Framework for Linux

Though all of the current main-stream OSs have supported superpage to some extent, most of them need runtime information provided by applications, simulator or other tools. Transparent superpage support is a further step, while so far there are only very few primitive attempts for Linux. In this paper, we propose the design of GISP (Global Information based SuperPage support), a transparent superpage support framework in Linux kernel. GISP adopts the basic idea of the reservationbased policy, and uses LMO (lightweight memory object) and POPMAP (population map) to manage the page allocation for applications. GISP could provide the core functions of superpage support while keeping the memory continuity by dynamic pages recycling. We implement it in Linux 2.4.17 on PKUnity SoC, and evaluate it for real workloads and benchmarks. We obtain substantial performance benefits from 8.1% to 24.0%. Compared with the best transparent superpage support in Linux up to now, we achieve better performa...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ASAP
• Authors: Ning Qu, Yansong Zheng, Wei Cao, Xu Cheng
• Keywords: ASAP 2007, Current Main-stream Oss, Distributed And Parallel Computing, GISP, Transparent Superpage Support