AML: Building Blocks for Memory Management

AML is a library to manage byte-addressable memory devices. The library is designed as a collection of building blocks, so that users can create custom memory management policies for allocation and placement of data across devices.

This library is still in the prototyping phase. APIs might break often.

Documentation

The latest documentation can be found online, can be installed when installing a release or generated from git clone before installing with

make -C doc doxygen

Requirements:

• autoconf
• automake
• libnuma

Installation

sh autogen.sh
./configure
make -j install

General Architecture

The architecture of the library relies on two principles: type-specific initialization functions, and generic interfaces to each building block.

The type-specific initialization functions include:

• _DECL macros to declare a typed building block on the stack.
• _create_ functions to allocate a building block and return its pointer.
• _init_ functions to initialize stack-allocated building blocks.

Generic interfaces all take a pointer to a building block.

Low-Level Building Blocks

Low-level building blocks provide the basic mechanisms required to implement any high-level memory management policy. This include:

• arenas: allocation policies inside a memory region
• areas: actual memory reservation on devices
• bindings: mapping pages/tiles of memory unto multiple devices
• tilings: chunking data

High-Level Building Blocks

High-level building blocks use the low-level ones to provide fancier memory management facilities, including:

• dmas: moving data across areas
• scratchpads: using an area as an explicitly managed cache of another one

Version Management

AML versionning is similar to semantic versionning. AML version is a string composed of 3 integers separated by a dot: "0.1.0" The first integer is the major version and all versions with the same major version are supposed ABI compatible except for major version 0 which is considered unstable.