Distributed, configurable memory management in an operating system supporting quality of service

Ongoing work is presented that takes advantage of several key trends in computing science to provide a novel, flexible, extensible, distributed, user-level virtual memory management hierarchy offering quality of service (QoS) to applications. The increasing disparity between CPU memory and hard disks has made on-line compression more viable than it was only a few years ago. The new hierarchy takes advantage of this to provide a compressed cache within its framework. Similarly, it takes advantage of increased network bandwidth to provide paging to the memory of remote hosts. The new system is further augmented with QoS parameters, allowing applications to specify their own page-fault handling performance requirements and provides feedback mechanisms that allows them to dynamically adjust their behaviour to cope with changes that may affect this. An overview of the design is presented, with the remote paging environment being described in some detail, along with some initial results