Redesigning the memory hierarchy for memory-safe programming languages

We present Hotpads, a new memory hierarchy designed from the ground up for modern, memory-safe languages like Java, Go, and Rust. Memory-safe languages hide the memory layout from the programmer. This prevents memory corruption bugs, improves programmability, and enables automatic memory management. Hotpads extends the same insight to the memory hierarchy: it hides the memory layout from software and enables hardware to take control over it, dispensing with the conventional flat address space abstraction. This avoids the need for associative caches and virtual memory. Instead, Hotpads moves objects across a hierarchy of directly-addressed memories. It rewrites pointers to avoid most associative lookups, provides hardware support for memory allocation, and unifies hierarchical garbage collection and data placement. As a result, Hotpads improves memory performance and efficiency substantially, and unlocks many new optimizations. This thesis contributes important optimizations for Hotpads and a comprehensive evaluation of Hotpads against prior work.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Gan, Yee Ling

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Daniel Sanchez.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119765

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/119765