Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Publication Date
10-12-2025
Department
Department of Computer Science
Abstract
Modern memory management systems suffer from poor performance and subtle concurrency bugs, slowing down applications while introducing security vulnerabilities. We observe that both issues stem from the conventional design of memory management systems with two levels of abstraction: a software-level abstraction (e.g., VMA trees in Linux) and a hardware-level abstraction (typically, page tables). This design increases portability but requires correctly and efficiently synchronizing two drastically different and complex data structures, which is generally challenging.We present CortenMM, a memory management system with a clean-slate design to achieve both high performance and synchronization correctness. Our key insight is that most OSes no longer need the software-level abstraction, since mainstream ISAs use nearly identical hardware MMU formats. Therefore, departing from prior designs, CortenMM eliminates the software-level abstraction to achieve sweeping simplicity. Exploiting this simplicity, CortenMM proposes a transactional interface with scalable locking protocols to program the MMU, achieving high performance by avoiding the extra contention in the software-level abstraction. The one-level design further enables us to formally verify the correctness of concurrent code operating on the MMU (correctness of basic operations and locking protocols), thereby offering strong correctness guarantees. Our evaluation shows that the formally verified CortenMM outperforms Linux by 1.2× to 26× on real-world applications.
Publication Title
Sosp 2025 Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Sigops 31st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles
ISBN
9798400718700
Recommended Citation
Zhang, J.,
Xu, X.,
Zou, Y.,
Tang, Z.,
Wan, X.,
Hu, K.,
Wang, S.,
Xu, W.,
Wang, D.,
Chen, H.,
Huang, L.,
Yan, S.,
Tamir, Y.,
Luo, Y.,
Wang, X.,
Yu, H.,
Wang, Z.,
Tian, H.,
&
Zhou, D.
(2025).
CortenMM: Efficient Memory Management with Strong Correctness Guarantees.
Sosp 2025 Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Sigops 31st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 1082-1098.
http://doi.org/10.1145/3731569.3764836
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/michigantech-p2/2168
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Version
Publisher's PDF
Publisher's Statement
© 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.1145/3731569.3764836