Evaluating the impacts of hugepage on virtual machines

CORC > 北京大学 > 信息科学技术学院

	Evaluating the impacts of hugepage on virtual machines
	Wang Xiaolin ; Luo Taowei ; Hu Jingyuan ; Wang Zhenlin ; Luo Yingwei
刊名	Science China. Information Science
	2017
关键词	hugepage memory management translation lookaside buffer virtualization performance
英文摘要	Modern applications often require a large amount of memory. Conventional 4KB pages lead to large page tables and thus exert high pressure on TLB address translations. This pressure is more prominent in a virtualized system, which adds an additional layer of address translation. Page walks due to TLB misses can result in a significant performance overhead. One effort in reducing this overhead is to use hugepage. Linux kernel has supported transparent hugepage since 2.6.38, which provides an alternate large page size. Generally, hugepage demonstrates better performance on address translations and page table modifications. This paper first analyzes the impact of hugepage on native system, and then, compares the impact of hugepage on different memory virtualization approaches: hardware-assisted paging (HAP), shadow paging, and para-virtualization. We observe that the current implementation of transparent hugepage is inefficient. It cannot exploit the full performance advantage of hugepages. Worse yet, the conservative strategy of transparent hugepage may conflict with existing OS functions, which can lead to performance degradation. So, we propose a new memory allocation strategy, alignment-based hugepage (ABH) that promotes hugepage allocations. We apply ABH to different paging modes in virtualized systems. The results show that the new allocation strategy can significantly reduce TLB misses and up to 90% page walk cycles due to TLB misses and thus improve the performance in real world applications.; supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China,National High-tech R&D Program of China (863),Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China,supported by National Science Foundation; 中国科学引文数据库(CSCD); 1; 012103-1-012103-16; 60
语种	英语
内容类型	期刊论文
源URL	[http://ir.pku.edu.cn/handle/20.500.11897/477715]
专题	信息科学技术学院
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	Wang Xiaolin,Luo Taowei,Hu Jingyuan,et al. Evaluating the impacts of hugepage on virtual machines[J]. Science China. Information Science,2017.
APA	Wang Xiaolin,Luo Taowei,Hu Jingyuan,Wang Zhenlin,&Luo Yingwei.(2017).Evaluating the impacts of hugepage on virtual machines.Science China. Information Science.
MLA	Wang Xiaolin,et al."Evaluating the impacts of hugepage on virtual machines".Science China. Information Science (2017).