Vmem: A Lightweight Hot-Upgradable Memory Management for In-production Cloud Environment
Hao Zheng, Qiang Wang, Longxiang Wang, Xishi Qiu, Yibin Shen, Xiaoshe Dong, Naixuan Guan, Jia Wei, Fudong Qiu, Xingjun Zhang, Yun Xu, Mao Zhao, Yisheng Xie, Shenglong Zhao, Min He, Yu Li, Xiao Zheng, Ben Luo, Jiesheng Wu

TL;DR
Vmem is a lightweight, upgradable memory management system designed for cloud environments, significantly improving memory utilization, stability, and performance with minimal overhead and supporting online upgrades.
Contribution
It introduces the first architecture supporting online upgrades for cloud memory management, enhancing flexibility, stability, and efficiency in production environments.
Findings
Increases sellable memory rate by about 2%
Achieves over 3x faster VM boot times
Improves network performance by about 10%
Abstract
Traditional memory management suffers from metadata overhead, architectural complexity, and stability degradation, problems intensified in cloud environments. Existing software/hardware optimizations are insufficient for cloud computing's dual demands of flexibility and low overhead. This paper presents Vmem, a memory management architecture for in-production cloud environments that enables flexible, efficient cloud server memory utilization through lightweight reserved memory management. Vmem is the first such architecture to support online upgrades, meeting cloud requirements for high stability and rapid iterative evolution. Experiments show Vmem increases sellable memory rate by about 2%, delivers extreme elasticity and performance, achieves over 3x faster boot time for VFIO-based virtual machines (VMs), and improves network performance by about 10% for DPU-accelerated VMs. Vmem has…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCloud Computing and Resource Management · Big Data and Digital Economy · Parallel Computing and Optimization Techniques
