Papers › User Mode Memory Page Allocation: A Silver Bullet For Memory Allocation?
User Mode Memory Page Allocation: A Silver Bullet For Memory Allocation?
Niall Douglas
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This paper proposes a novel solution: the elimination of paged virtual memory and partial outsourcing of memory page allocation and manipulation from the operating system kernel into the individual process' user space - a user mode page allocator - which allows an application to have direct, bare metal access to the page mappings used by the hardware Memory Management Unit (MMU) for its part of the overall address space. A user mode page allocator based emulation of the mmap() abstraction layer of dlmalloc is then benchmarked against the traditional kernel mode implemented mmap() in a series of synthetic Monte-Carlo and real world application settings. Given the superb synthetic and positive real world results from the profiling conducted, this paper proposes that with proper operating system and API support one could gain a further order higher performance again while keeping allocator performance invariant to the amount of memory being allocated or freed i.e. a 100x performance improvement or more in some common use cases. It is rare that through a simple and easy to implement API and operating system structure change one can gain a Silver Bullet with the potential for a second one.
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