Non-Volatile Unified Memory Page Management for Improving Performance

Newly emerging non-volatile memory´s future is promising and challenging because its performance and power consumption has been improved significantly. The performance improvement triggers these to be a major part of the today´s generation computer systems in replacing main memory specially. This research particularly focuses on the page fault and page swap management via Operating System (OS) in order to improve the performance by employing unified memory system (UMS). This proposes, merging of conventional main memory and storage into a single memory layer, called as Unified Memory System. Also the proposed module is designed virtually in two zones, static zone and dynamic zone to support conventional memory management. For this, we analyze the operating system memory management behavior and its tendency to manage the non-volatile UMS through OS kernel for improving system performance. Avoiding data duplication between main memory and storage and frequent page faults are the major concern of this research, unlike a conventional DRAM main memory based system. We utilize phase change memory (PCM) as a suitable candidate for constructing UMS, because of its high density and non-volatility features. We depict the significant number of reduced page faults and execution improvement which will support the fast booting of the systems in near future.