Memif: Towards Programming Heterogeneous Memory Asynchronously

To harness a heterogeneous memory hierarchy, it is advantageous to integrate application knowledge in guiding frequent memory move, i.e., replicating or migrating virtual memory regions. To this end, we present memif, a protected OS service for asynchronous, hardware-accelerated memory move. Compared to the state of the art - page migration in Linux, memif incurs low overhead and low latency; in order to do so, it not only redefines the semantics of kernel interface but also overhauls the underlying mechanisms, including request/completion management, race handling, and DMA engine configuration.We implement memif in Linux for a server-class system-on- chip that features heterogeneous memories. Compared to the current Linux page migration, memif reduces CPU usage by up to 15% for small pages and by up to 38x for large pages; in continuously serving requests, memif has no need for request batching and reduces latency by up to 63%. By crafting a small runtime atop memif, we improve the throughputs for a set of streaming workloads by up to 33%. Overall, memif has opened the door to software management of heterogeneous memory.