CXL-DMSim: A Full-System CXL Disaggregated Memory Simulator With Comprehensive Silicon Validation

Compute eXpress Link (CXL) has emerged as a key enabler of memory disaggregation for future heterogeneous computing systems to expand memory on-demand and improve resource utilization. However, CXL is still in its infancy stage and lacks commodity products on the market, thus necessitating a reliable system-level simulation tool for research and development. In this paper, we propose CXL-DMSim¹, an open-source full-system simulator to simulate CXL disaggregated memory systems with high fidelity at a gem5-comparable simulation speed. CXL-DMSim incorporates a flexible CXL memory expander model along with its associated device driver, and CXL protocol support with CXL.io and CXL.mem. It can operate in both app-managed mode and kernel-managed mode, with the latter using a dedicated NUMA-compatible mechanism. The simulator has been rigorously verified against a real hardware testbed with both FPGA- and ASIC-based CXL memory devices, which demonstrates the qualification of CXL-DMSim in simulating the characteristics of various CXL memory devices at an average simulation error of 3.4%. The experimental results using LMbench and STREAM benchmarks suggest that the CXL-FPGA memory exhibits a ~2.88× higher latency than local DDR while the CXL-ASIC latency is ~2.18×; CXL-FPGA achieves 45-69% of local DDR memory bandwidth, whereas the number for CXL-ASIC is 82-83%. The study also reveals that CXL memory can significantly enhance the performance of memory-intensive applications, improved by 23× at most with limited local memory for Viper key–value database and approximately 60% in memory-bandwidth-sensitive scenarios such as MERCI. Moreover, the simulator’s observability and expandability are showcased with detailed case-studies, highlighting its great potential for research on future CXL-interconnected hybrid memory pool.