Scalable memory management using a distributed buddy allocator

Abstract

The recent rise of multicore processors has forced us to reexamine old computer science problems in a new light. As multicores turn into manycores, we need to visit these problems yet again to find solutions that will work on these drastically different architectures. This thesis presents the design of a new page allocator algorithm based on a new distributed buddy allocator algorithm, one which is made with future processor architectures in mind. The page allocator is a vital and heavily-used part of an operating system, and making this more scalable is a necessary step to build a scalable operating system. This design was implemented in the fos [34] research operating system, and evaluated on 8- and 16-core machines. The results show that this design has comparable performance with Linux for small core counts, and with its better scalability, surpasses the performance of Linux at higher core counts.