IOSR: Improving I/O Efficiency for Memory Swapping on Mobile Devices Via Scheduling and Reshaping

Abstract

Mobile systems and applications are becoming increasingly feature-rich and powerful, which constantly suffer from memory pressure, especially for devices equipped with limited DRAM. Swapping inactive DRAM pages to the storage device is a promising solution to extend the physical memory. However, existing mobile devices usually adopt flash memory as the storage device, where swapping DRAM pages to flash memory may introduce significant performance overhead. In this paper, we first conduct an in-depth analysis of the I/O characteristics of the flash-based memory swapping, including the I/O interference and swap I/O randomness in swap subsystem. Then an I/O efficiency optimization framework for memory swapping (IOSR) is proposed to enhance the performance of flash-based memory swapping for mobile devices. IOSR consists of two methods: swap I/O scheduling (SIOS) and swap I/O pattern reshaping (SIOR). SIOS is designed to schedule the swap I/O to reduce interference with other processes I/Os. SIOR is designed to reshape the swap I/O pattern with process-oriented swap slot allocation and adaptive granularity swap read-ahead. IOSR is implemented on Google Pixel 4. Experimental results show that IOSR reduces the application switching time by 31.7% and improves the swap-in bandwidth by 35.5% on average compared to the state-of-the-art.