RAMinate: Hypervisor-based Virtualization for Hybrid Main Memory Systems
RAMinate: Hypervisor-based Virtualization for Hybrid Main Memory Systems
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DOI：
10.1145/2987550.2987570
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发表时间：
2016-10
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Takahiro Hirofuchi;Ryousei Takano
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文献类型：
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作者：
Takahiro Hirofuchi;Ryousei Takano
未来，STT-MRAM将获得更大的容量和相当的读/写性能，但会产生比DRAM大几个数量级的写入能量。为了实现大容量和高能效，必须同时使用DRAM和STT-MRAM作为计算机的主存储器。本文提出了一种基于管理程序的混合存储机制RAMinate，该机制通过优化DRAM和STT-MRAM之间的页面位置来减少对STT-MRAM的写入流量。与过去的研究不同，我们的机制工作在管理程序级别，而不是硬件或操作系统级别。它不需要操作系统级的任何特殊程序，也不需要在硬件级对当前的内存控制器进行任何设计更改。我们通过扩展QEMU/KVM开发了一个原型系统，并进行了应用基准测试。我们确认，我们的页面替换机制成功地适用于未经修改的操作系统，并动态地将内存写入流量转移到DRAM。我们的实验还证实，对于测试的工作负载，我们的系统成功地将STT-MRAM的写入流量减少了约70%，与仅使用DRAM的系统相比，能耗降低了50%。
In the future, STT-MRAM will achieve larger capacity and comparable read/write performance, but incur orders of magnitude greater write energy than DRAM. To achieve large capacity as well as energy-efficiency, it is necessary to use both DRAM and STT-MRAM for the main memory of a computer. In this paper, we propose a hypervisor-based hybrid memory mechanism (RAMinate) that reduces write traffic to STT-MRAM by optimizing page locations between DRAM and STT-MRAM. In contrast to past studies, our mechanism works at the hypervisor level, not at the hardware or operating system level. It does not require any special program at the operating system level nor any design changes of the current memory controller at the hardware level. We developed a prototype of the proposed system by extending Qemu/KVM and conducted experiments with application benchmarks. We confirmed that our page replacement mechanism successfully worked for unmodified operating systems and dynamically diverted memory write traffic to DRAM. Our experiments also confirmed that our system successfully reduced write traffic to STT-MRAM by approximately 70% for tested workloads, which results in a 50% reduction in energy consumption in comparison to a DRAM-only system.