Redesigning the memory hierarchy for memory-safe programming languages
Name
1078783843-MIT.pdf
Description
Full printable version
Size
1.37 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d07e75918a89570aa32065949274c807
Author(s)
Gan, Yee Ling
Advisor(s)
Daniel Sanchez.
Date Issued
2018
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
We present Hotpads, a new memory hierarchy designed from the ground up for modern, memory-safe languages like Java, Go, and Rust. Memory-safe languages hide the memory layout from the programmer. This prevents memory corruption bugs, improves programmability, and enables automatic memory management. Hotpads extends the same insight to the memory hierarchy: it hides the memory layout from software and enables hardware to take control over it, dispensing with the conventional flat address space abstraction. This avoids the need for associative caches and virtual memory. Instead, Hotpads moves objects across a hierarchy of directly-addressed memories. It rewrites pointers to avoid most associative lookups, provides hardware support for memory allocation, and unifies hierarchical garbage collection and data placement. As a result, Hotpads improves memory performance and efficiency substantially, and unlocks many new optimizations. This thesis contributes important optimizations for Hotpads and a comprehensive evaluation of Hotpads against prior work.
Description
Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2018.
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 69-75).
Subjects
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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