Providing extra memory for virtual machines by sharing compressed swap pages

Virtualization systems are currently being applied to embedded devices such as TVs and cell phones. However, these embedded devices have insufficient memory, which can decrease the performance of an application. To provide more memory and improve the performance of applications on a virtual machine, we propose an effective swapping method. When a swap-out occurs on a virtual machine, we compress the swapped page and send it to another virtual machine with sufficient memory. If a compressed swapped page already exists, it will be shared with other virtual machines. By compressing and sharing the swapped pages, our method can reduce their number by 79%.