Towards Efficient Hugepage-aware Memory Deduplication

Memory deduplication techniques aim to reduce memory consumption by sharing redundant memory pages. Additionally, hugepages are commonly employed to optimize performance by minimizing TLB misses. However, the simultaneous use of memory deduplication and hugepages presents a technical challenge. Existing approaches either split hugepages to achieve efficient memory deduplication or overlook redundant portions within hugepages to maintain high performance. As a result, they are compelled to compromise either performance or memory utilization. This paper identifies the fundamental issue causing the current dilemma as the absence of tight cooperation between the host and guest. Existing approaches manage all actions within the host OS without engaging the guest OS. In contrast, we propose a new memory deduplication framework, which adopts a host-guest co-design approach. We integrate host memory deduplication, shared data hot-plugging, and guest memory migration to simultaneously attain superior performance, a high deduplication rate, and reduced memory consumption.