Adaptive Memory Fusion: Towards Transparent, Agile Integration of Persistent Memory

The great promise of in-memory computing inspires en-gineers to scale their main memory subsystems in a timely and efficient manner. Offering greatly expanded capacity at near-DRAM speed, today’s new-generation persistent memory (PM) module is no doubt an ideal candidate for system upgrade. However, integrating DRAM-comparable PMs in current enterprise systems faces big barriers in terms of huge system modifications for software compati-bility and complex runtime support. In addition, the very large PM capacity unavoidably results in massive metadata, which introduces significant performance and energy overhead. The inefficiency issue becomes even acute when the memory system reaches its capacity limit or the application requires large memory space allocation. In this paper we propose adaptive memory fusion (AMF), a novel PM integration scheme that jointly solves the above issues. Rather than struggle to adapt to the persistence property of PM through modifying the full software stack, we focus on exploiting the high capacity feature of emerging PM modules. AMF is designed to be totally transparent to user applications by carefully hiding PM devices and managing the available PM space in a DRAM-like way. To further improve the performance, we devise holistic optimization scheme that allows the system to efficiently utilize system resources. Specifically, AMF is able to adaptively release PM based on memory pressure status, smartly reclaim PM pages, and enable fast space expansion with direct PM pass-through. We implement AMF as a kernel subsystem in Linux. Compared to traditional approaches, AMF could decrease the page faults number of high-resident-set benchmarks by up to 67.8% with an average of 46.1%. Using realistic in-memory database, we show that AMF outperforms existing solutions by 57.7% on SQLite and 21.8% on Redis. Overall, AMF represents a more lightweight design approach and it would greatly encourage rapid and flexible adoption of PM in the near future.