Virtual memory management for interactive continuous media applications

Abstract

This paper proposes a virtual memory management system suitable for interactive continuous media applications. Interactive continuous media applications usually require a large amount of memory for storing their code, data, and stack segments. In traditional operating systems, demand paging makes it possible to execute such large applications by storing most pages in secondary disks. However, continuous media applications should avoid page faults for ensuring timing constraints of continuous media since it takes a long time to swap pages between physical memory and secondary storage. Thus, it is difficult to satisfy timing constraints of continuous media. Therefore, some operating systems provide memory wiring primitives that enable applications to wire pages in physical memory by specifying the range of virtual address spaces explicitly. On the other hand, our virtual memory management system enables continuous media applications to reserve physical memory for allocating pages as soon as possible when the applications require the pages. The system implicitly and incrementally allocates and wires pages used for processing timing critical media data. Also, our system supports applications that adapt the amount of wired memory to the memory usage of other continuous media applications.