UCat: heterogeneous memory management for unikernels

Abstract

Unikernels provide an efficient and lightweight way to deploy cloud computing services in application-specialized and single-address-space virtual machines (VMs). They can efficiently deploy hundreds of unikernel-based VMs in a single physical server. In such a cloud computing platform, main memory is the primary bottleneck resource for high-density application deployment. Recently, non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies has become increasingly popular in cloud data centers because they can offer extremely large memory capacity at a low expense. However, there still remain many challenges to utilize NVMs for unikernel-based VMs, such as the difficulty of heterogeneous memory allocation and high performance overhead of address translations.

In this paper, we present UCat, a heterogeneous memory management mechanism that support multi-grained memory allocation for unikernels. We propose front-end/back-end cooperative address space mapping to expose the host memory heterogeneity to unikernels. UCat exploits large pages to reduce the cost of two-layer address translation in virtualization environments, and leverages slab allocation to reduce memory waste due to internal memory fragmentation. We implement UCat based on a popular unikernel--OSv and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate its efficiency. Experimental results show that UCat can reduce the memory consumption of unikernels by 50% and TLB miss rate by 41%, and improve the throughput of real-world benchmarks such as memslap and YCSB by up to 18.5% and 14.8%, respectively.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

unikernel / virtualization / non-volatile memory / heterogeneous memory / large page / slab allocation

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