ABSTRACT

Traditional operating systems use a fixed LRU-like page replacement policy and centralized frame pool that cannot properly serve all types of memory access patterns of various applications. As a result, many memory-intensive applications, such as databases, multimedia applications and scientific simulators, in- duce excessive page faults and page replacement when running on top of existing operating systems. This paper presents a High Performance External virtual memory Caching mechanism (HiPEC) to pro- vide applications with their own specific page replace- ment management. The user specific policy, pro- grammed in the HIPEC command set, is stored in user address space. When a page fault occurs, the kernel fetches and interprets the corresponding policy com- mands to perform the user-specific page replacement management. Experimental results show that HiPEC induces little overhead and can significantly improve performance for memory-intensive applications.