ProSwap: Period-aware Proactive Swapping to Maximize Embedded Application Performance

Linux prevents errors due to physical memory limits by swapping out active application memory from main memory to secondary storage. Swapping degrades application performance due to swap-in/out latency overhead. To mitigate the swapping overhead in periodic applications, we present ProSwap: a period-aware proactive and adaptive swapping policy for em-bedded systems. ProSwap exploits application periodic behavior to proactively swap-out rarely-used physical memory pages, creating more space for active processes. A flexible memory reclamation time-window enables adaptation to memory limitations that vary between applications. We demonstrate ProSwap's efficacy for an autonomous vehicle application scenario executing multi-application pipelines, and show that our policy achieves up to 1.26×performance gain via proactive swapping.