Power-aware memory management for hybrid main memory

In this paper, we propose the main memory management mechanism of the Operating System (OS) for the hybrid main memory which combines both advantages of DRAM and PRAM (Phase Change RAM). We separate memory pages into hot and cold pages, and dynamically located them to the proper memory region. It was implemented into the Linux OS. We decreased the energy consumption of main memory up to 35% while performance degradation was less than 5%. Moreover, when we decreased the write count for PRAM, life-time of PRAM increased. In addition to these advantages, the system does not need additional hardware.