Operating system support for small objects

Operating systems should support fine-grained objects in two important ways. One is the use of fairly small pages (e.g. 1 KB) and fast, flexible virtual memory primitives. Another is the use of a binary code format that supports precise identification of pointers in registers and stacks. These features can support many novel and efficient uses of conventional hardware. Pointer swizzling (address translation) at page fault time can efficiently support huge address spaces with modest word sizes. Compressed paging implements a new level in the memory hierarchy (compressed in-memory storage) to bridge the growing gap between RAM and disk. Adaptive prefetching promises to reduce page fault costs more effectively than increasing page sizes. Many other applications would also benefit, including garbage collection, checkpointing, distributed virtual memories, lazy evaluation, and memory striping to reduce cache conflicts