HawkEye: Efficient Fine-grained OS Support for Huge Pages

Effective huge page management in operating systems is necessary for mitigation of address translation overheads. However, this continues to remain a difficult area in OS design. Recent work on Ingens uncovered some interesting pitfalls in current huge page management strategies. Using both page access patterns discovered by the OS kernel and fine-grained data from hardware performance counters, we expose problematic aspects of current huge page management strategies. In our system, called HawkEye/Linux, we demonstrate alternate ways to address issues related to performance, page fault latency and memory bloat; the primary ideas behind HawkEye management algorithms are async page pre-zeroing, de-duplication of zero-filled pages, fine-grained page access tracking and measurement of address translation overheads through hardware performance counters. Our evaluation shows that HawkEye is more performant, robust and better-suited to handle diverse workloads when compared with current state-of-the-art systems.