Vmem: A Lightweight Hot-Upgradable Memory Management for In-production Cloud Environment

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zheng, Hao, Wang, Qiang, Wang, Longxiang, Qiu, Xishi, Shen, Yibin, Dong, Xiaoshe, Guan, Naixuan, Wei, Jia, Qiu, Fudong, Zhang, Xingjun, Xu, Yun, Zhao, Mao, Xie, Yisheng, Zhao, Shenglong, He, Min, Li, Yu, Zheng, Xiao, Luo, Ben, Wu, Jiesheng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911263265652736
author Zheng, Hao
Wang, Qiang
Wang, Longxiang
Qiu, Xishi
Shen, Yibin
Dong, Xiaoshe
Guan, Naixuan
Wei, Jia
Qiu, Fudong
Zhang, Xingjun
Xu, Yun
Zhao, Mao
Xie, Yisheng
Zhao, Shenglong
He, Min
Li, Yu
Zheng, Xiao
Luo, Ben
Wu, Jiesheng
author_facet Zheng, Hao
Wang, Qiang
Wang, Longxiang
Qiu, Xishi
Shen, Yibin
Dong, Xiaoshe
Guan, Naixuan
Wei, Jia
Qiu, Fudong
Zhang, Xingjun
Xu, Yun
Zhao, Mao
Xie, Yisheng
Zhao, Shenglong
He, Min
Li, Yu
Zheng, Xiao
Luo, Ben
Wu, Jiesheng
contents Traditional memory management suffers from metadata overhead, architectural complexity, and stability degradation, problems intensified in cloud environments. Existing software/hardware optimizations are insufficient for cloud computing's dual demands of flexibility and low overhead. This paper presents Vmem, a memory management architecture for in-production cloud environments that enables flexible, efficient cloud server memory utilization through lightweight reserved memory management. Vmem is the first such architecture to support online upgrades, meeting cloud requirements for high stability and rapid iterative evolution. Experiments show Vmem increases sellable memory rate by about 2%, delivers extreme elasticity and performance, achieves over 3x faster boot time for VFIO-based virtual machines (VMs), and improves network performance by about 10% for DPU-accelerated VMs. Vmem has been deployed at large scale for seven years, demonstrating efficiency and stability on over 300,000 cloud servers supporting hundreds of millions of VMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09961
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Vmem: A Lightweight Hot-Upgradable Memory Management for In-production Cloud Environment
Zheng, Hao
Wang, Qiang
Wang, Longxiang
Qiu, Xishi
Shen, Yibin
Dong, Xiaoshe
Guan, Naixuan
Wei, Jia
Qiu, Fudong
Zhang, Xingjun
Xu, Yun
Zhao, Mao
Xie, Yisheng
Zhao, Shenglong
He, Min
Li, Yu
Zheng, Xiao
Luo, Ben
Wu, Jiesheng
Operating Systems
Traditional memory management suffers from metadata overhead, architectural complexity, and stability degradation, problems intensified in cloud environments. Existing software/hardware optimizations are insufficient for cloud computing's dual demands of flexibility and low overhead. This paper presents Vmem, a memory management architecture for in-production cloud environments that enables flexible, efficient cloud server memory utilization through lightweight reserved memory management. Vmem is the first such architecture to support online upgrades, meeting cloud requirements for high stability and rapid iterative evolution. Experiments show Vmem increases sellable memory rate by about 2%, delivers extreme elasticity and performance, achieves over 3x faster boot time for VFIO-based virtual machines (VMs), and improves network performance by about 10% for DPU-accelerated VMs. Vmem has been deployed at large scale for seven years, demonstrating efficiency and stability on over 300,000 cloud servers supporting hundreds of millions of VMs.
title Vmem: A Lightweight Hot-Upgradable Memory Management for In-production Cloud Environment
topic Operating Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09961