Better Control Over Memory Management: Hinting with Love/Hate

Current memory management policy is, on most sys-tems, global and in exible. Current systems provide poor mechanisms to allow the programmer to share knowledge of access patterns that may generate im-proved page swapping and caching. In this paper we modify a popular operating system's memory manage-ment policy to take into account hints given by the pro-grammer. The system consists of love and hate hints given to the kernel via system calls. It gives the pro-grammer the option of moving a page to the front of the swap line or informing the operating system that the page should be kept on the active list. The paper demonstrates the improved performance that a system can gain through the use of the love and hate hints