THE ADVANCED COMPUTING SYSTEMS ASSOCIATION The following paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference Monterey, California, USA, June 6-11, 1999 The Case for Compressed Caching in Virtual Memory Systems _ Paul R. Wilson, Scott F. Kaplan, and Yannis Smaragdakis aUniversity of Texas at Austin © 1999 by The USENIX Association All Rights Reserved Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for noncommercial reproduction of the work for educational or research purposes. This copyright notice must be included in the reproduced paper. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks herein. For more information about the USENIX Association: Phone: 1 510 528 8649 FAX: 1 510 548 5738 Email:
[email protected] WWW: http://www.usenix.org The Case for Compressed Caching in Virtual Memory Systems Paul R. Wilson, Scott F. Kaplan, and Yannis Smaragdakis Dept. of Computer Sciences University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 78751-1182 g fwilson|sfkaplan|smaragd @cs.utexas.edu http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/oops/ Abstract In [Wil90, Wil91b] we proposed compressed caching for virtual memory—storing pages in compressed form Compressed caching uses part of the available RAM to in a main memory compression cache to reduce disk pag- hold pages in compressed form, effectively adding a new ing. Appel also promoted this idea [AL91], and it was level to the virtual memory hierarchy. This level attempts evaluated empirically by Douglis [Dou93] and by Russi- to bridge the huge performance gap between normal (un- novich and Cogswell [RC96]. Unfortunately Douglis’s compressed) RAM and disk.