High-performance operating system controlled memory compression

This article describes a new software-based on-line memory compression algorithm for embedded systems and presents a method of adaptively managing the uncompressed and compressed memory regions during application execution. The primary goal of this work is to save memory in disk-less embedded systems, resulting in greater functionality, smaller size, and lower overall cost, without modifying applications or hardware. In comparison with algorithms that are commonly used in on-line memory compression, our new algorithm has a comparable compression ratio but is twice as fast. The adaptive memory management scheme effectively responds to the predicted needs of applications and prevents on-line memory compression deadlock, permitting reliable and efficient compression for a wide range of applications. We have evaluated our technique on an embedded portable device and have found that the memory available to applications can be increased by 150%, allowing the execution of applications with larger working data sets, or allowing existing applications to run with less physical memory