APP: Enabling Soft Real-Time Execution on Densely-Populated Hybrid Memory System

Memory swapping was considered slow and evil, but swapping to Ultra Low-Latency storage like Optane has become a promising solution to save power and cost, helping densely-populated edge server to overcome its DRAM capacity bottleneck. However, the lack of integration between CPU scheduling and memory paging causes soft real-time tasks running on edge servers to miss deadlines under heavy memory multiplexing. We propose APP (Adaptive Page Pinning), lightweight protection of working set memory to ensure meeting soft real-time task deadlines without starving other non-real-time tasks. Experiments show that APP alleviates thrashing in memory-intensive tasks and upholds soft real-time task deadlines.