SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR EFFICIENT SWAP SPACE ALLOCATION IN A VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENT

摘要

A technique for efficient swap space management creates a swap reservation file using thick provisioning to accommodate a maximum amount of memory reclamation from a set of one or more associated virtual machines (VMs). A VM swap file is created for each VM using thin provisioning. When a new block is needed to accommodate page swaps to a given VM swap file, a block is removed from the swap reservation file and a block is added to the VM swap file, thereby maintaining a net zero difference in overall swap storage. The removed block and the added block may be the same storage block if a block move operation is supported by a file system implementing the swap reservation file and VM swap files. The technique also accommodates swap space management of resource pools.

主权项

1. In a computing system having a plurality of processes running therein, each process having a memory space that is backed by machine memory of the computer system and a corresponding thinly-provisioned swap file, a method for swapping out contents of a page of memory from the machine memory to a thinly-provisioned swap file, said method comprising:
determining that the thinly-provisioned swap file needs additional capacity to store the contents of the page; moving a storage block from a thickly-provisioned swap reservation file to the swap file; and storing the contents of the page to the moved storage block.