Feedback-based memory management with active swap-in

Memory and swap management is an important issue in operating systems, owing to the large difference between RAM and disk access times. This paper presents a memory management layer, designed along a fully control-theoretical approach, that decouples the swap-out and swap-in activity from the events triggered by the applications´ memory access patterns. A system endowed with this layer can manage memory on a per-process basis, while at the same time avoiding the presence of swapped-out pages if RAM memory is available. Such a tunable active swap-in mechanism thus inherently avoids temporary RAM over-utilisations to slow down the system for a period significantly longer than their duration. Simulation results prove the effectiveness of the proposal, as well as the viability of its integration with existing memory managers.