Accelerating Page Migrations in Operating Systems With Intel DSA

Abstract

Modern server-class CPUs are introducing special-purpose accelerators on the same chip to improve performance and efficiency for data-intensive applications. This paper presents a case for accelerating data migrations in operating systems with the Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA), a new feature by Intel. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that exploits a hardware-assisted data migration scheme in the operating system. We identify which Linux kernel components can benefit from the hardware acceleration, particularly focusing on the kernel subsystems that rely on the migrate_pages() kernel function. As the hardware accelerator is not suitable for transferring a small amount of data due to the HW setup overhead, this preliminary study concentrates on the design and implementation of accelerating migrate_pages() with DSA. We prototype a DSA-enabled Linux kernel and evaluate its effectiveness through two benchmarks demonstrating real-world page compaction (kcompactd) and promotion (kdamond) scenarios. In both cases, our prototype demonstrates improved throughput in page migration, benefiting both the kernel subsystem and applications.