Operating System Support for Fast Hardware Compression of Main Memory Contents

A novel computer system hardware has been built for compressing main memory contents. This presents to the operating systems an expanded real memory larger than the physically available memory. Two to one or better compression ratio has been observed for most applications. As the compression ratio of applications dynamically changes so does the real memory size that is managed by the OS. In this paper, we describe and evaluate the operating system techniques developed for compressed memory systems that can deal with such dynamically changing memory size conditions.