UCat: heterogeneous memory management for unikernels

摘要

Unikernels provide an efficient and lightweight way to deploy cloud computing services in application-specialized and single-address-space virtual machines (VMs). They can efficiently deploy hundreds of unikernel-based VMs in a single physical server. In such a cloud computing platform, main memory is the primary bottleneck resource for high-density application deployment. Recently, non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies has become increasingly popular in cloud data centers because they can offer extremely large memory capacity at a low expense. However, there still remain many challenges to utilize NVMs for unikernel-based VMs, such as the difficulty of heterogeneous memory allocation and high performance overhead of address translations.