Intel Corporation
TWO-LEVEL MAIN MEMORY HIERARCHY MANAGEMENT

Abstract:

A two-level main memory in which both volatile memory and persistent memory are exposed to the operating system in a flat manner and data movement and management is performed in cache line granularity is provided. The operating system can allocate pages in the two-level main memory randomly across the first level main memory and the second level main memory in a memory-type agnostic manner, or, in a more intelligent manner by allocating predicted hot pages in first level main memory and predicted cold pages in second level main memory. The cache line granularity movement is performed in a "swap" manner, that is, a hot cache line in the second level main memory is swapped with a cold cache line in first level main memory because data is stored in either first level main memory or second level main memory not in both first level main memory and second level main memory.