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Mallocpool: Improving Memory Performance Through Contiguously TLB Mapped Memory

Authors:

Marcus Jägemar

Publication Type:

Conference/Workshop Paper

Venue:

International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation

Abstract

Many computer systems allocate and free many memory chunks over the application lifespan. One problem with allocating many chunks is that they may not be contiguously allocated causing a massive strain on caches, translation lookaside buffers (TLB), and the memory subsystem. We have devised a method that preallocates a large memory fragment, mapping it with a variable size TLB, and then allocate subsequently requested chunks from that fragment. Our method has two advantages. The first is that all chunks allocated by malloc() are allocated contiguously, thus allowing a better cache-locality. The second advantage is that we can map the whole memory region with one variable size TLB reducing much of the 4kB TLB strain. These two advantages drastically improve the memory access performance. We have implemented our method in a Linux library which we can either dynamically or statically link to an existing application. The library is API-compatible to the GlibC library and can act as a drop-in replacement removing any need for legacy application changes.

Bibtex

@inproceedings{Jagemar5210,
author = {Marcus J{\"a}gemar},
title = {Mallocpool: Improving Memory Performance Through Contiguously TLB Mapped Memory},
month = {September},
year = {2018},
booktitle = {International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation},
url = {http://www.es.mdu.se/publications/5210-}
}