VM Design Issues Vivek Pai / Kai Li Princeton University

2 Mini-Gedankenexperimenten What’s the refresh rate of your monitor? What is the access time of a hard drive? What response time determines sluggishness or speediness? What’s the relation? What determines the running speed of a program that’s paging heavily? If you have a program that pages heavily, what are your options to improve the situation?

3 Mechanics The midterm was probably too long Haven’t looked closely at them Grading based on mean, std deviation Almost lost a lecture – today’s Already had some post-midterm slack I’ll adjust the web page appropriately Project client updated – maybe use it

4 Where We Left Off Last Time Various approaches to evicting pages Some discussion about why doing even “well” is hard to implement Belady’s algorithm for off-line analysis

5 The Big Picture We’ve talked about single evictions Most computers are multiprogrammed Single eviction decision still needed New concern – allocating resources How to be “fair enough” and achieve good overall throughput This is a competitive world – local and global resource allocation decisions

6 x86 Page Table Entry Valid Writable Owner (user/kernel) Write-through Cache disabled Accessed (referenced) Dirty PDE maps 4MB Global Page frame numberDLGlCwPUACdWtOWV Reserved 31 12

7 Program Behaviors 80/20 rule > 80% memory references are made by < 20% of code Locality Spatial and temporal Working set Keep a set of pages in memory would avoid a lot of page faults # pages in memory # page faults Working set

8 Observations re Working Set Working set isn’t static There often isn’t a single “working set” Multiple plateaus in previous curve Program coding style affects working set Working set is hard to gauge What’s the working set of an interactive program?

9 Working Set Main idea Keep the working set in memory An algorithm On a page fault, scan through all pages of the process If the reference bit is 1, record the current time for the page If the reference bit is 0, check the “last use time” If the page has not been used within , replace the page Otherwise, go to the next Add the faulting page to the working set

10 WSClock Paging Algorithm Follow the clock hand If the reference bit is 1, set reference bit to 0, set the current time for the page and go to the next If the reference bit is 0, check “last use time” If page has been used within , go to the next If page hasn’t been used within  and modify bit is 1 Schedule the page for page out and go to the next If page hasn’t been used within  and modified bit is 0 Replace this page

11 Simulating Modify Bit with Access Bits Set pages read-only if they are read-write Use a reserved bit to remember if the page is really read-only On a read fault If it is not really read-only, then record a modify in the data structure and change it to read-write Restart the instruction

12 Implementing LRU without Reference Bit Some machines have no reference bit VAX, for example Use the valid bit or access bit to simulate Invalidate all valid bits (even they are valid) Use a reserved bit to remember if a page is really valid On a page fault If it is a valid reference, set the valid bit and place the page in the LRU list If it is a invalid reference, do the page replacement Restart the faulting instruction

13 Demand Paging Pure demand paging relies only on faults to bring in pages Problems? Possibly lots of faults at startup Ignores spatial locality Remedies Loading groups of pages per fault Prefetching/preloading

14 Speed and Sluggishness Slow is >.1 seconds (100 ms) Speedy is <<.1 seconds Monitors tend to be 60+ Hz = <16.7ms between screen paints Disks have seek + rotational delay Seek is somewhere between 7-16 ms At 7200rpm, one rotation = 1/120 sec = 8ms. Half-rotation is 4ms Conclusion? One disk access OK, six are bad

15 Disk Address Use physical memory as a cache for disk Where to find a page on a page fault? PPage# field is a disk address Virtual address space invalid Physical memory

16 Imagine a Global LRU Global – across all processes Idea – when a page is needed, pick the oldest page in the system Problems? Process mixes? Interactive processes Active large-memory sweep processes Mitigating damage?

17 Amdahl’s Law Gene Amdahl (IBM, then Amdahl) Noticed the bottlenecks to speedup Assume speedup affects one component New time = (1-not affected) + affected/speedup In other words, diminishing returns

18 NT x86 Virtual Address Space Layouts FFFFFFF System cache Paged pool Nonpaged pool Kernel & exec HAL Boot drivers Process page tables Hyperspace Application code Globals Per-thread stacks DLL code 3-GB user space 1-GB system space BFFFFFFF C FFFFFFFF C C

19 Virtual Address Space in Win95 and Win FFFFFFF Operating system (Ring 0 components) Shared, process-writable (DLLs, shared memory, Win16 applications) Win95 and Win98 User accessible FFFFFFFF C Unique per process (per application), user mode Systemwide user mode Systemwide kernel mode

20 Details with VM Management Create a process’s virtual address space Allocate page table entries (reserve in NT) Allocate backing store space (commit in NT) Put related info into PCB Destroy a virtual address space Deallocate all disk pages (decommit in NT) Deallocate all page table entries (release in NT) Deallocate all page frames

21 Page States (NT) Active: Part of a working set and a PTE points to it Transition: I/O in progress (not in any working sets) Standby: Was in a working set, but removed. A PTE points to it, not modified and invalid. Modified: Was in a working set, but removed. A PTE points to it, modified and invalid. Modified no write: Same as modified but no write back Free: Free with non-zero content Zeroed: Free with zero content Bad: hardware errors

22 Working set replacement Page in or allocation Demand zero fault Dynamics in NT VM Process working set Standby list Modified list Modified writer “Soft” faults Free list Zero thread Zero list Bad list

23 Shared Memory How to destroy a virtual address space? Link all PTEs Reference count How to swap out/in? Link all PTEs Operation on all entries How to pin/unpin? Link all PTEs Reference count Process 1 Process 2 w w Page table Physical pages

Copy-On-Write Child’s virtual address space uses the same page mapping as parent’s Make all pages read-only Make child process ready On a read, nothing happens On a write, generates an access fault map to a new page frame copy the page over restart the instruction Parent process Child process r r r r Page table Physical pages

25 Issues of Copy-On-Write How to destroy an address space Same as shared memory case? How to swap in/out? Same as shared memory How to pin/unpin Same as shared memory