SRM-buffer: an OS buffer management technique to prevent last level cache from thrashing in multicores

Buffer caches in operating systems keep active file blocks in memory to reduce disk accesses. Related studies have been focused on how to minimize buffer misses and the caused performance degradation. However, the side effects and performance implications of accessing the data in buffer caches (i.e. buffer cache hits) have not been paid attention. In this paper, we show that accessing buffer caches can cause serious performance degradation on multicores, particularly with shared last level caches (LLCs). There are two reasons for this problem. First, data in files normally have weaker localities than data objects in virtual memory spaces. Second, due to the shared structure of LLCs on multicore processors, an application accessing the data in a buffer cache may flush the to-be-reused data of its co-running applications from the shared LLC and significantly slow down these applications. The paper proposes a buffer cache design called Selected Region Mapping Buffer (SRM-buffer) for ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: EUROSYS
• Authors: Xiaoning Ding, Kaibo Wang, Xiaodong Zhang
• Keywords: Disk Accesses, EUROSYS 2011, Intel Labs, Level Caches, Software Engineering