Architectural And Operating System Support For Virtual Memory

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Architectural and Operating System Support for Virtual Memory

Author: Abhishek Bhattacharjee
language: en
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool Publishers
Release Date: 2017-09-29
This book provides computer engineers, academic researchers, new graduate students, and seasoned practitioners an end-to-end overview of virtual memory. We begin with a recap of foundational concepts and discuss not only state-of-the-art virtual memory hardware and software support available today, but also emerging research trends in this space. The span of topics covers processor microarchitecture, memory systems, operating system design, and memory allocation. We show how efficient virtual memory implementations hinge on careful hardware and software cooperation, and we discuss new research directions aimed at addressing emerging problems in this space. Virtual memory is a classic computer science abstraction and one of the pillars of the computing revolution. It has long enabled hardware flexibility, software portability, and overall better security, to name just a few of its powerful benefits. Nearly all user-level programs today take for granted that they will have been freed from the burden of physical memory management by the hardware, the operating system, device drivers, and system libraries. However, despite its ubiquity in systems ranging from warehouse-scale datacenters to embedded Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the overheads of virtual memory are becoming a critical performance bottleneck today. Virtual memory architectures designed for individual CPUs or even individual cores are in many cases struggling to scale up and scale out to today's systems which now increasingly include exotic hardware accelerators (such as GPUs, FPGAs, or DSPs) and emerging memory technologies (such as non-volatile memory), and which run increasingly intensive workloads (such as virtualized and/or "big data" applications). As such, many of the fundamental abstractions and implementation approaches for virtual memory are being augmented, extended, or entirely rebuilt in order to ensure that virtual memory remains viable and performant in the years to come.
Architectural and Operating System Support for Virtual Memory

Author: Abhishek Bhattacharjee
language: en
Publisher: Springer Nature
Release Date: 2022-05-31
This book provides computer engineers, academic researchers, new graduate students, and seasoned practitioners an end-to-end overview of virtual memory. We begin with a recap of foundational concepts and discuss not only state-of-the-art virtual memory hardware and software support available today, but also emerging research trends in this space. The span of topics covers processor microarchitecture, memory systems, operating system design, and memory allocation. We show how efficient virtual memory implementations hinge on careful hardware and software cooperation, and we discuss new research directions aimed at addressing emerging problems in this space. Virtual memory is a classic computer science abstraction and one of the pillars of the computing revolution. It has long enabled hardware flexibility, software portability, and overall better security, to name just a few of its powerful benefits. Nearly all user-level programs today take for granted that they will have been freed from the burden of physical memory management by the hardware, the operating system, device drivers, and system libraries. However, despite its ubiquity in systems ranging from warehouse-scale datacenters to embedded Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the overheads of virtual memory are becoming a critical performance bottleneck today. Virtual memory architectures designed for individual CPUs or even individual cores are in many cases struggling to scale up and scale out to today's systems which now increasingly include exotic hardware accelerators (such as GPUs, FPGAs, or DSPs) and emerging memory technologies (such as non-volatile memory), and which run increasingly intensive workloads (such as virtualized and/or "big data" applications). As such, many of the fundamental abstractions and implementation approaches for virtual memory are being augmented, extended, or entirely rebuilt in order to ensure that virtual memory remains viable and performant in the years to come.
Hardware and Software Support for Virtualization

This book focuses on the core question of the necessary architectural support provided by hardware to efficiently run virtual machines, and of the corresponding design of the hypervisors that run them. Virtualization is still possible when the instruction set architecture lacks such support, but the hypervisor remains more complex and must rely on additional techniques. Despite the focus on architectural support in current architectures, some historical perspective is necessary to appropriately frame the problem. The first half of the book provides the historical perspective of the theoretical framework developed four decades ago by Popek and Goldberg. It also describes earlier systems that enabled virtualization despite the lack of architectural support in hardware. As is often the case, theory defines a necessary—but not sufficient—set of features, and modern architectures are the result of the combination of the theoretical framework with insights derived frompractical systems. The second half of the book describes state-of-the-art support for virtualization in both x86-64 and ARM processors. This book includes an in-depth description of the CPU, memory, and I/O virtualization of these two processor architectures, as well as case studies on the Linux/KVM, VMware, and Xen hypervisors. It concludes with a performance comparison of virtualization on current-generation x86- and ARM-based systems across multiple hypervisors.