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Anatomy of Linux Kernel Shared Memory

Posted by kdawson on from the culture-by-another-name dept.

An anonymous reader sends in an IBM DeveloperWorks backgrounder on Kernel Shared Memory in the 2.6.32 Linux kernel. KSM allows the hypervisor to increase the number of concurrent virtual machines by consolidating identical memory pages. The article covers the ideas behind KSM (such as storage de-duplication), its implementation, and how you manage it.

2 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Re:First Post by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    From the article:
    "Going further

    Linux is not alone in using page sharing to improve memory efficiency, but it is unique in its implementation as an operating system feature. VMware's ESX server hypervisor provides this feature under the name Transparent Page Sharing (TPS), while XEN calls it Memory CoW. But whatever the name or implementation, the feature provides better memory utilization, allowing the operating system (or hypervisor, in the case of KVM) to over-commit memory to support greater numbers of applications or VMs. You can find KSM—and many other interesting features—in the latest 2.6.32 Linux kernel."

  2. Re:This Is Just One Reason ... by abigor · · Score: 4, Informative

    OS X's kernel is open source (BSD license) and very well documented.