MEGA: Overcoming Traditional Problems with OS Huge Page Management Theodore Michailidis Alex Delis Mema Roussopoulos University of Athens University of Athens University of Athens Athens, Greece Athens, Greece Athens, Greece
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Modern computer systems now feature memory banks whose Huge pages, Address Translation, Memory Compaction aggregate size ranges from tens to hundreds of GBs. In this context, contemporary workloads can and do often consume ACM Reference Format: Theodore Michailidis, Alex Delis, and Mema Roussopoulos. 2019. vast amounts of main memory. This upsurge in memory con- MEGA: Overcoming Traditional Problems with OS Huge Page Man- sumption routinely results in increased virtual-to-physical agement. In The 12th ACM International Systems and Storage Con- address translations, and consequently and more importantly, ference (SYSTOR ’19), June 3–5, 2019, Haifa, Israel. ACM, New York, more translation misses. Both of these aspects collectively NY, USA, 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3319647.3325839 do hamper the performance of workload execution. A solu- tion aimed at dramatically reducing the number of address translation misses has been to provide hardware support for 1 INTRODUCTION pages with bigger sizes, termed huge pages. In this paper, we Computer memory capacities have been increasing sig- empirically demonstrate the benefits and drawbacks of using nificantly over the past decades, leading to the development such huge pages. In particular, we show that it is essential of memory hungry workloads that consume vast amounts for modern OS to refine their software mechanisms to more of main memory. This upsurge in memory consumption rou- effectively manage huge pages.