Re: [LSF/MM/BPF TOPIC] TAO: THP Allocator Optimizations

[Kaiyang Zhao <kaiyang2@cs.cmu.edu>]

On Wed, Mar 06, 2024 at 10:51:10AM -0500, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> This is a very interesting topic to me. Meta has collaborated with CMU
> to research this as well, the results of which are typed up here:
> https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3579371.3589079
> 
> 
> I would like to be part of it, and would also suggest to have Kaiyang
> (CC'd) in the room, who is the primary researcher on the Contiguitas
> paper referenced above.

Thanks for bringing up Contiguitas, Johannes. Providing a large amount
of physical memory contiguity and managing it as a first-class resource
is very important for bringing a lot of research in virtual memory into
reality.

Johannes has already touched upon many parts of the kernel changes we
made in the Contiguitas project. To summarize, we want to confine the
unmovable allocations in a separate region in the physical address space
so that later memory contiguity can be obtained by successfully doing
compaction, and provide the ability to dynamically size the unmovable
region to adapt to changing workload characteristics and avoid static
sizing.

I will send an RFC with patches soon. Dimitrios (cc’d) and I are
interested in joining this effort and finding the best approach to
achieve our shared goal of more and easier-to-manage physical
contiguity.