Memory management in a distributed system of single address space operating systems supporting quality of service

The choices provided by an operating system to the application developer for managing memory came in two forms: no choice at all, with the operating system making all decisions about managing memory; or the choice to implement virtual memory management specific to the individual application. The second of these choices is, for all intents and purposes, the same as the first: no choice at all. For many application developers, the cost of implementing a customised virtual memory management system is just too high. The results is that, regardless of the level of flexibility available, the developer ends up using the system-provided default. Further exacerbating the problem is the tendency for operating system developers to be extremely unimaginative when providing that same default. Advancements in virtual memory techniques such as prefetching, remote paging, compressed caching, and user-level page replacement coupled with the provision of user-level virtual memory management should have heralded a new era of choice and an application-centric approach to memory management. Unfortunately, this has failed to materialise. This dissertation describes the design and implementation of the Heracles virtual memory management system. The Heracles approach is one of inclusion rather than exclusion. The main goal of Heracles is to provide an extensible environment that is configurable to the extent of providing application-centric memory management without the need for application developers to implement their own. However, should the application developer wish to provide a more specialised implementation for all or any part of Heracles, the system is constructed around well-defined interfaces that allow new implementations to be "plugged in" where required. The result is a virtual memory management hierarchy that is highly configurable, highly flexible, and can be adapted at run-time to meet new phases in the application's behaviour. Furthermore, different parts of an application's address space can have different hierarchies associated with managing its memory