COLORIS: A Dynamic Cache Partitioning System Using Page Coloring

Shared caches in multicore processors are subject to con-tention from co-running threads. The resultant interference can lead to highly-variable performance for individual ap-plications. This is particularly problematic for real-time applications, requiring predictable timing guarantees. Pre-vious work has applied page coloring techniques to parti-tion a shared cache, so that conflict misses are minimized amongst co-running workloads. However, prior page color-ing techniques have not addressed the problem of partition-ing a cache on over-committed processors where there are more executable threads than cores. Similarly, page coloring techniques have not proven efficient at adapting the cache partition sizes for threads with varying memory demands. This paper presents a memory management framework called COLORIS, which provides support for both static and dynamic cache partitioning using page coloring. COLORIS supports novel policies to reconfigure the assignment of page colors amongst application threads in over-committed sys-tems. For quality-of-service (QoS), COLORIS monitors the cache miss rates of running applications and triggers re-partitioning of the cache to prevent miss rates exceeding applications-specific ranges. This paper presents the design and evaluation of COLORIS as applied to Linux. We show the efficiency and effectiveness of COLORIS to color mem-ory pages for a set of SPEC CPU2006 workloads, thereby enhancing performance isolation over existing page coloring techniques