Making Linux Faster by Fixing a Major Memory Management Bottleneck

What is it about?

Modern computers run programs with many threads at once, and the operating system’s kernel must carefully manage how each program uses memory. Unfortunately, this memory management often becomes a major performance bottleneck. In Linux and similar systems, multiple threads that request or release memory (through operations like mmap() and munmap()) must take turns because the kernel protects these operations with a single, large lock. This serialization can drastically slow down highly parallel applications. This research introduces a new way for the kernel to manage memory regions more efficiently and in parallel. The implementation on the Linux 6.8 kernel shows significant speedups—improving performance by up to 13× in microbenchmarks and by several times in widely used software such as LevelDB and the Apache web server.

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Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash