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.

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.

We introduce the scheduler subversion problem, where lock usage patterns determine which thread runs, thereby subverting CPU scheduling goals. To mitigate this problem, we introduce Scheduler-Cooperative Locks (SCLs), a new family of locking primitives that controls lock usage and thus aligns with system-wide scheduling goals; our initial work focuses on proportional share schedulers. Unlike existing locks, SCLs provide an equal (or proportional) time window called lock opportunity within which each thread can acquire the lock. We design and implement three different scheduler-cooperative locks that work well with proportional-share schedulers: a user-level mutex lock (u-SCL), a reader-writer lock (RW-SCL), and a simplified kernel implementation (k-SCL). We demonstrate the effectiveness of SCLs in two user-space applications (UpScaleDB and KyotoCabinet) and the Linux kernel. In all three cases, regardless of lock usage patterns, SCLs ensure that each thread receives proportional lock allocations that match those of the CPU scheduler. Using microbenchmarks, we show that SCLs are efficient and achieve high performance with minimal overhead under extreme workloads.