Zram Instance Pool Framework for Adaptive Memory Compression in Resource-Sensitive Embedded Operating Systems

Abstract

Memory compression can reduce the size of the inactive data in the random access memory (RAM), thereby freeing up unused space and allowing more programs to run; however, current mainstream memory compression frameworks (e.g., Zram and Zswap) and algorithms (e.g., Zstd and Lz4) do not effectively solve the problem of increased CPU utilization, causing they cannot be directly applied to the resource-sensitive embedded operating system, that is, sensitive to both CPU utilization and memory usage. In this study, we develop a Zram instance pool framework called ZramPool for adaptive memory compression. The framework consists of the swap space with multiple Zram instances and the adaptive Zram compression module. Through introducing linear regression analysis, the number of Zram instances can be adaptively adjusted based on the size of the compressed data, allowing Zram instances to work in parallel to match the workload. In ZramPool, we achieve two different requirements of reducing CPU utilization while keeping compression speed and increasing compression speed while keeping CPU utilization. ZramPool is deployed in the embedded Linux OS with a 8GB memory size running on the ARMv8 architecture. For the first requirement, ZramPool can reduce CPU utilization by an average of 11.42% while the compression speed only decreases by an average of 2.4%. For the second requirement, ZramPool can increase compression speed by an average of 11.71% while the CPU utilization only increases by an average of 1.9%.