Memos: Revisiting Hybrid Memory Management in Modern Operating System

Abstract: The emerging hybrid DRAM-NVM architecture is challenging the existing memory management mechanism in operating system. In this paper, we introduce memos, which can schedule memory resources over the entire memory hierarchy including cache, channels, main memory comprising DRAM and NVM simultaneously. Powered by our newly designed kernel-level monitoring module and page migration engine, memos can dynamically optimize the data placement at the memory hierarchy in terms of the on-line memory patterns, current resource utilization and feature of memory medium. Our experimental results show that memos can achieve high memory utilization, contributing to system throughput by 19.1% and QoS by 23.6% on average. Moreover, memos can reduce the NVM side memory latency by 3~83.3%, energy consumption by 25.1~99%, and benefit the NVM lifetime significantly (40X improvement on average).