The rise in memory demands of emerging datacenter applications has placed virtual memory translation in the spotlight, exposing it as a significant performance bottleneck.To address this problem, this paper introduces Learned Virtual Memory (LVM), a page table structure that effectively provides optimal single-access address translation.LVM is founded on a novel learned index model that dynamically adapts the address translation procedure based on the characteristics of an application's virtual address space.Furthermore, LVM's learned index requires minimal memory space, does not impose stringent physical contiguity requirements, enjoys high cacheability in the MMU, efficiently supports insertions, and relies on simple fixed-point arithmetic.Finally, LVM supports all features of virtual memory, including multiple page sizes.We evaluate LVM with a set of operating system (OS) extensions in Linux, RTL synthesis, and full-system simulations across a wide range of workloads.LVM reduces the address translation overhead by an average of 44% over radix page tables, while reducing the page walk cache area required by 1.5×.Overall, LVM achieves a 2-27% speedup in application execution time and is within 1% of an ideal page table.

The rapid growth of machine learning (ML) has made GPUs indispensable in datacenters and underscores the urgency of improving their efficiency. However, balancing diverse model demands with high utilization remains a fundamental challenge. Transparent, fine-grained GPU resource management that maximizes utilization, energy efficiency, and isolation requires an OS approach. This paper introduces LithOS, a first step towards a GPU OS.

The unabating growth of the memory needs of emerging datacenter applications has exacerbated the scalability bottleneck of virtual memory. However, reducing the excessive overhead of address translation will remain onerous until the physical memory contiguity predicament gets resolved. To address this problem, this paper presents Contiguitas, a novel redesign of memory management in the operating system and hardware that provides ample physical memory contiguity. We identify that the primary cause of memory fragmentation in Meta's datacenters is unmovable allocations scattered across the address space that impede large contiguity from being formed. To provide ample physical memory contiguity by design, Contiguitas first separates regular movable allocations from unmovable ones by placing them into two different continuous regions in physical memory and dynamically adjusts the boundary of the two regions based on memory demand. Drastically reducing unmovable allocations is challenging because the majority of unmovable pages cannot be moved with software alone given that access to the page cannot be blocked for a migration to take place. Furthermore, page migration is expensive as it requires a long downtime to (a) perform TLB shootdowns that scale poorly with the number of victim TLBs, and (b) copy the page. To this end, Contiguitas eliminates the primary source of unmovable allocations by introducing hardware extensions in the last-level cache to enable the transparent and efficient migration of unmovable pages even while the pages remain in use.

Resource isolation is a fundamental requirement in datacenter environments. However, our production experience in Meta’s large-scale datacenters shows that existing IO control mechanisms for block storage are inadequate in containerized environments. IO control needs to provide proportional resources to containers while taking into account the hardware heterogeneity of storage devices and the idiosyncrasies of the workloads deployed in datacenters. The speed of modern SSDs requires IO control to execute with low-overheads. Furthermore, IO control should strive for work conservation, take into account the interactions with the memory management subsystem, and avoid priority inversions that lead to isolation failures. To address these challenges, this paper presents IOCost, an IO control solution that is designed for containerized environments and provides scalable, work-conserving, and low-overhead IO control for heterogeneous storage devices and diverse workloads in datacenters. IOCost performs offline profiling to build a device model and uses it to estimate device occupancy of each IO request. To minimize runtime overhead, it separates IO control into a fast per-IO issue path and a slower periodic planning path. A novel work-conserving budget donation algorithm enables containers to dynamically share unused budget. We have deployed IOCost across the entirety of Meta’s datacenters comprised of millions of ma- chines, upstreamed IOCost to the Linux kernel, and open-sourced our device-profiling tools. IOCost has been running in production for two years, providing IO control for Meta’s fleet. We describe the design of IOCost and share our experience deploying it at scale.

The unrelenting growth of the memory needs of emerging datacenter applications, along with ever increasing cost and volatility of DRAM prices, has led to DRAM being a major infrastructure expense. Alternative technologies, such as NVMe SSDs and upcoming NVM devices, offer higher capacity than DRAM at a fraction of the cost and power. One promising approach is to transparently offload colder memory to cheaper memory technologies via kernel or hypervisor techniques. The key challenge, however, is to develop a datacenter-scale solution that is robust in dealing with diverse workloads and large performance variance of different offload devices such as compressed memory, SSD, and NVM. This paper presents TMO, Meta’s transparent memory offloading solution for heterogeneous datacenter environments. TMO introduces a new Linux kernel mechanism that directly measures in realtime the lost work due to resource shortage across CPU, memory, and I/O. Guided by this information and without any prior application knowledge, TMO automatically adjusts how much memory to offload to heterogeneous devices (e.g., compressed memory or SSD) according to the device’s performance characteristics and the application’s sensitivity to memory-access slowdown. TMO holistically identifies offloading opportunities from not only the application containers but also the sidecar containers that provide infrastructure-level functions. To maximize memory savings, TMO targets both anonymous memory and file cache, and balances the swap-in rate of anonymous memory and the reload rate of file pages that were recently evicted from the file cache. TMO has been running in production for more than a year, and has saved between 20-32% of the total memory across millions of servers in our large datacenter fleet. We have successfully upstreamed TMO into the Linux kernel.