Honey, I Shrunk the Guests Page Access Tracking using a Minimal Virtualisation Layer

Nguyen DT, Rußer S, Ott M, Kapitza R, Schröder-Preikschat W, Nolte J (2025)

Publication Language: English

Publication Type: Conference contribution, Conference Contribution

Publication year: 2025

Event location: Co-located with ASPLOS/EUROSYS 2025 Rotterdam, Netherlands NL

ISBN: 979-8-4007-1470-2/25/03

DOI: 10.1145/3723851.3723852

Open Access Link: https://doi.org/10.1145/3723851.3723852

Abstract

Advances in memory-intensive areas such as machine learning and graph processing drive demand for suited memory technologies. Part of the answer lies in multi-memory architectures with fast and high-capacity memory tiers. Heterogeneous systems can be very diverse, ranging from NUMA to persistent memory and CXL-attached memory. Efficient usage requires support from the operating system (OS) with knowledge of memory performance characteristics and detailed insight into the page access behaviour of processes. Gathering statistics on the read/write-ratio of accesses and (huge) page utilisation is expensive with common methods.
In this paper, we propose vmmload, a minimal virtualisation layer to monitor user space programs using a virtualisation-based page modification log (PML) for efficiently gathering runtime statistics. While PML is a hardware extension that was originally designed to track virtual machine memory access, vmmload enables observation of individual processes. vmmload monitored user space processes run with PML-enabled virtualisation, but are still able to interface with the host OS. We explore the viability of using PML without a conventional virtual machine and providing the host OS with the ability to use these extensions directly.

Authors with CRIS profile

Dustin Tien Nguyen Lehrstuhl für Informatik 4 (Systemsoftware) Maximilian Ott Lehrstuhl für Informatik 4 (Systemsoftware) Rüdiger Kapitza Lehrstuhl für Informatik 4 (Systemsoftware) Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat Technische Fakultät

Related research project(s)

Power-fail aware byte-addressable virtual non-volatile memory (PAVE) SPP 2377: Disruptive Memory Technologies April 5, 2021 - May 14, 2026

Involved external institutions

Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus-Senftenberg (BTU) DE Germany (DE)

How to cite

APA:

Nguyen, D.T., Rußer, S., Ott, M., Kapitza, R., Schröder-Preikschat, W., & Nolte, J. (2025). Honey, I Shrunk the Guests Page Access Tracking using a Minimal Virtualisation Layer. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Heterogeneous Composable and Disaggregated Systems. Co-located with ASPLOS/EUROSYS 2025 Rotterdam, Netherlands, NL.

MLA:

Nguyen, Dustin Tien, et al. "Honey, I Shrunk the Guests Page Access Tracking using a Minimal Virtualisation Layer." Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Heterogeneous Composable and Disaggregated Systems, Co-located with ASPLOS/EUROSYS 2025 Rotterdam, Netherlands 2025.

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