FHPM: Fine-grained Huge Page Management For Virtualization
Chuandong Li (1), Sai Sha (1), Yangqing Zeng (1), Xiran Yang (1),, Yingwei Luo (1), Xiaolin Wang (1), Zhenlin Wang (2) ((1) Peking University,, (2) Michigan Technological University)

TL;DR
FHPM introduces a method for fine-grained huge page management in virtualization, enabling better access tracking and dynamic page promotion or demotion without hardware or guest OS modifications.
Contribution
It proposes a novel approach to track base page access within huge pages by redirecting EPT entries, improving memory management and sharing in virtualized environments.
Findings
Up to 33% performance improvement in tiered memory management.
Achieves 41% more memory savings compared to state-of-the-art sharing solutions.
Reduces VM-exits with VM-friendly page splitting and collapsing.
Abstract
As more data-intensive tasks with large footprints are deployed in virtual machines (VMs), huge pages are widely used to eliminate the increasing address translation overhead. However, once the huge page mapping is established, all the base page regions in the huge page share a single extended page table (EPT) entry, so that the hypervisor loses awareness of accesses to base page regions. None of the state-of-the-art solutions can obtain access information at base page granularity for huge pages. We observe that this can lead to incorrect decisions by the hypervisor, such as incorrect data placement in a tiered memory system and unshared base page regions when sharing pages. This paper proposes FHPM, a fine-grained huge page management for virtualization without hardware and guest OS modification. FHPM can identify access information at base page granularity, and dynamically promote…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCloud Computing and Resource Management · Advanced Data Storage Technologies · Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
