HARDWARE-ASSISTED MEMORY COMPRESSION MANAGEMENT USING PAGE FILTER AND SYSTEM MMU

摘要

Provided are methods and systems for managing memory using a hardware-based page filter designed to distinguish between active and inactive pages (“hot” and “cold” pages, respectively) so that inactive pages can be compressed prior to the occurrence of a page fault. The methods and systems are designed to achieve, among other things, lower cost, longer battery life, and faster user response. Whereas existing approaches for memory management are based on pixel or frame buffer compression, the methods and systems provided focus on the CPU's program (e.g., generic data structure). Focusing on hardware-accelerated memory compression to offload CPU translates higher power efficiency (e.g., ASIC is approximately 100× lower power than CPU) and higher performance (e.g., ASIC is approximately 10× faster than CPU), and also allows for hardware-assisted memory management to offload OS/kernel, which significantly increases response time.

主权项

1. A method for memory compression management comprising:
using a page filter to determine that a page in a virtual memory space is inactive; removing working memory address information for the inactive page from a page table of a corresponding operating system; determining a location in working memory to allocate compression information tor the inactive page; allocating a compressed memory address for the inactive page; updating a translation lookaside buffer with the compressed memory address for the inactive page; and writing the compressed memory address to the compressed memory.