CRAMES: compressed RAM for embedded systems

Memory is a scarce resource in many embedded systems. Increasing memory often increases packaging and cooling costs, size, and energy consumption. This paper presents CRAMES, an efficient software-based RAM compression technique for embedded systems. The goal of CRAMES is to dramatically increase effective memory capacity without hardware design changes, while maintaining high performance and low energy consumption. To achieve this goal, CRAMES takes advantage of an operating system's virtual memory infrastructure by storing swapped-out pages in compressed format. It dynamically adjusts the size of the compressed RAM area, protecting applications capable of running without it from performance or energy consumption penalties. In addition to compressing working data sets, CRAMES also enables efficient in-RAM filesystem compression, thereby further increasing RAM capacity. CRAMES was implemented as a loadable module for the Linux kernel and evaluated on a battery-powered embedded system. Experimental results indicate that CRAMES is capable of doubling the amount of RAM available to applications. Execution time and energy consumption for a broad range of examples increase only slightly, by averages of 0.35% and 4.79%. In addition, this work identifies the software-based compression algorithms that are most appropriate for low-power embedded systems.