Compressed Virtual Memory Pool for High-Resolution Displays
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Solution Overview
Problem
Traditional virtual memory systems face performance degradation due to limited physical memory sizes, especially when handling higher screen resolutions, as they are not capable of supporting performance requirements without a compensating increase in physical memory size, leading to slower system performance and inefficient memory swapping.
Innovation Solution
A dynamic compressed memory pool is maintained within a memory device, allowing for the compression and decompression of memory pages, enabling efficient data transfer and swapping with a mass storage device, thereby increasing available memory space and supporting virtual memory operations without size limitations.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Quantity of substance
If memory swapping using storage device is used to support virtual memory, then memory space can exceed physical capacity, but IO throughput and latency are negatively impacted
Solution Approach 1:
The patent divides the memory management system into multiple segments: compressed memory pool, uncompressed memory pool, and swap space. Memory pages are segmented into compressed and uncompressed states, allowing the system to maintain frequently accessed pages in uncompressed form while swapping less frequently accessed compressed pages to storage, thereby improving IO throughput while still expanding virtual memory capacity.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent changes the physical state parameter of memory pages by compressing them before swapping to storage device. By transforming memory pages from uncompressed to compressed state, the system reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred during swap operations, improving IO throughput and reducing latency while maintaining the ability to exceed physical memory capacity.
2Quantity of substance
If memory swapping using storage device is used to support virtual memory, then memory space can exceed physical capacity, but latency for transferring stored memory data increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent performs preliminary compression of memory pages before they are swapped to the storage device. By compressing pages in advance while they are still in the compressed memory pool, the system prepares them for efficient storage transfer, reducing the time required for swap operations and minimizing latency when pages need to be accessed.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent changes the data density parameter by compressing memory pages before swapping. This transformation reduces the volume of data that must be transferred between storage and memory, directly reducing transfer latency while still enabling the virtual memory system to support larger address spaces than physical memory alone.
3Productivity
If physical memory size is increased to support higher screen resolution, then performance requirements can be met, but device cost and complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies compression to change the effective density of the compressed memory pool, allowing more logical memory to be contained within the same physical memory resources. This enables the system to support higher screen resolutions and larger memory requirements without proportionally increasing physical memory size, thereby maintaining performance while controlling device cost and complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
A method and an apparatus for a memory device including a dynamically updated portion of compressed memory for a virtual memory are described. The memory device can include an uncompressed portion of memory separate from the compressed portion of memory. The virtual memory may be capable of mapping a memory address to the compressed portion of memory. A memory region allocated in the uncompressed portion of memory can be compressed into the compressed portion of memory. As a result, the memory region can become available (e.g. after being compressed) for future allocation requested in the memory device. The compressed portion of memory may be updated to store the compressed memory region. The compressed memory region may be decompressed back to the uncompressed portion in the memory device in response to a request to access data in the compressed memory region.