Paper Title
Memory Page Management For PCM-Based Mobile Embedded Systems
Abstract
Phase change memory is anticipated to be used as secondary storage in mobile embedded systems. These systems
usually employ a compressed file system (CFS) to store system files which are fixed during the design phase, in combination
with a normal file system to store data files. Since retrieving pages from a CFS requires additional decompression time, it is
reasonable to grant them higher priorities when selecting an eviction victim. In this paper, we present a new page management
policy for phase change memory based embedded systems that considers asymmetric operation cost of each page. The
proposed algorithm considers the decompression cost of a page from CFS as well as the asymmetric I/O costs of reads and
writes in PCM. To do this, the algorithm partitions the memory space into a read area, a write area, and a compressed area
depending on different operation costs. The size of each area is then dynamically adjusted based on the change of access
patterns and the contribution to reducing the I/O costs. Trace-driven simulations show that the proposed algorithm improves
the I/O performance of mobile embedded systems significantly. Specifically, it reduces I/O time by 4.8-53.3% compared to
widely acknowledged algorithms such as CLOCK, CAR, and CFLRU.
Index Terms- Compressed file system, Memory management policy, PCM, Storage.