Path: page access tracking to improve memory management

Traditionally, operating systems use a coarse approximation of memory accesses to implement memory management algorithms by monitoring page faults or scanning page table entries. With finer-grained memory access information, however, the operating system can manage memory much more effectively. Previous work has proposed the use of a software mechanism based on virtual page protection and soft faults to track page accesses at finer granularity. In this paper, we show that while this approach is effective for some applications, for many others it results in an unacceptably high overhead. We propose simple Page Access Tracking Hardware (PATH) to provide accurate page access information to the operating system. The suggested hardware support is generic and can be used by various memory management algorithms. In this paper, we show how the information generated by PATH can be used to implement (i) adaptive page replacement policies, (ii) smart process memory allocation to improve perf...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: IWMM
• Authors: Reza Azimi, Livio Soares, Michael Stumm, Thomas Walsh, Angela Demke Brown
• Keywords: Hardware, IWMM 2007, Memory Management Algorithms, Operating Systems, Page