Virtual-Memory Assisted Buffer Management In Tiered Memory

2026-03-03

AI Summary

Traditional virtual memory–assisted buffer management struggles to efficiently support data migration and access in multi-tier memory architectures. This work proposes vmcacheⁿ, a framework that extends the conventional two-level (DRAM–disk) buffering mechanism to an n-level hierarchy (DRAM–remote memory–disk). Leveraging the operating system’s virtual memory subsystem and page migration facilities, vmcacheⁿ constructs a multi-tier cache pool by integrating remote memory technologies such as NUMA and CXL. To enable fine-grained and low-overhead cross-tier page migration, the framework introduces a new system call, move_pages2. Experimental evaluation under the TPC-C workload demonstrates that vmcacheⁿ achieves up to a 4× improvement in query throughput compared to the original vmcache.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Scalability, Parallel & Distributed Systems
• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

Tiered memory architectures have gained significant traction in the database community in recent years. In these architectures, the on-chip DRAM of the host processor is typically referred to as local memory, and forms the primary tier. Additional byte-addressable, cache-coherent memory resources, collectively referred to as remote memory (RMem, for short), form one or more secondary tiers. RMem is slower than local DRAM but faster than disk, e.g., NUMA memory located on a remote socket, chiplet-attached memory, and memory attached via high-performance interconnect protocols, e.g., RDMA and CXL. In this paper, we discuss how traditional two-tier (DRAM-Disk) virtual-memory assisted Buffer Management techniques generalize to an $n$-tier setting (DRAM-RMem-Disk). We present vmcache$^n$, an $n$-tier virtual-memory-assisted buffer pool that leverages the virtual memory subsystem and operating system calls to migrate pages across memory tiers. In this setup, page migration can become a bottleneck. To address this limitation, we introduce the move_pages2 system call that provides vmcache$^n$ with fine-grained control over the page migration process. Experiments show that vmcache$^n$ can achieve up to 4$\times$ higher query throughput over vmcache for TPC-C workloads.

Problem

• tiered memory
• buffer management
• virtual memory
• page migration
• n-tier

Innovation

• tiered memory
• virtual memory
• buffer management
• page migration
• move_pages2