Research Showcase Gallery (Poster 2168)

NVSwap: Latency-Aware Paging using Non-Volatile Main Memory

Abstract

Page relocation (paging) from DRAM to swap devices is an important task of a virtual memory system in operating systems. Existing Linux paging mechanisms have two main deficiencies: (1) they may incur a high I/O latency due to write interference on solid-state disks and aggressive memory page reclaiming rate under high memory pressure and (2) they do not provide predictable latency bound for latency-sensitive applications because they cannot control the allocation of system resources among concurrent processes sharing swap devices.

We present the design and implementation of a latency-aware paging mechanism called NVSwap. It supports a hybrid swap space using both regular secondary storage devices (e.g., solid-state disks) and non-volatile main memory (NVMM). The design is more cost-effective than using only NVMM as swap spaces. Furthermore, NVSwap uses NVMM as a persistent paging buffer to serve the page-out requests and hide the latency of paging between the regular swap device and DRAM. It supports in-situ paging for pages in the persistent paging buffer avoiding the slow I/O path. Finally, NVSwap allows users to specify latency bounds for individual processes or a group of related processes and enforces the bounds by dynamically controlling the resource allocation of NVMM and page reclaiming rate in memory among scheduling units. We have implemented a prototype of NVSwap in the Linux kernel-3.16.74. Our results demonstrate that NVSwap reduces paging latency by up to 99% and provides performance guarantee and isolation among concurrent applications sharing swap devices.


About the Presenters

photo of Yekang Wu

Yekang Wu

Yekang Wu, Graduate Student, Washington State University. It is the second year for me to study computer science in Washington State University.