A novel computer system hardware has been built for compressing main memory
contents. This presents to the operating systems an expanded real memory larger than the
physically available memory. Two to one or better compression ratio has been observed
for most applications. As the compression ratio of applications dynamically changes so
does the real memory size that is managed by the OS. In this paper, we describe and
evaluate the operating system techniques developed for compressed memory systems that
can deal with such dynamically changing memory size conditions.
By: Bulent Abali, Hubertus Franke
Published in: RC21964 in 2000
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