Method to minimize hot/cold page detection overhead on running workloads

A compute platform comprising:

• a System on a Chip (SoC) including a central processing unit (CPU) having one or more cores on which software is executed including an operating system having a kernel and one or more processes associated with applications;
• local memory coupled to the SoC comprising a near memory tier;
• and
• at least one input-output (IO) interface configured to be coupled to memory in a far memory tier;
• wherein execution of the software enables the compute platform to:
• populate a page meta data structure with meta data associated with memory pages in the near memory tier and far memory tier;
• in conjunction with one or more of the processes accessing memory pages in near and far memory tiers, filter, for each of at least one of the one or more processes, updating of page meta data for one or more selected memory pages accessed by that process, the filtering resulting in updating of page meta data for less than all the memory pages accessed by the process;
• update the page meta data structure to reflect accesses to memory pages including memory pages that are filtered;
• and
• employ the page meta data to determine which pages are hot pages and which pages are cold pages, wherein hot pages are memory pages with relatively higher access frequencies and cold pages are memory pages with relatively lower access frequencies.

A non-transitory machine-readable storage medium having instructions comprising an operating system including a kernel stored thereon, the operating system configured to be run on a compute platform via execution of the instructions on a processor of the compute platform, the processor coupled to local memory comprising near memory, the compute platform including or providing access to one or more tiers of far memory, wherein execution of the instructions enables the operating system to:

• populate a page meta data structure with meta data associated with memory pages in the remote memory pool;
• in conjunction with one or more processes executing on the processor accessing memory pages in a far memory tier, filter, for each of at least one of the one or more processes, updating of meta data for one or more selected memory pages in the far memory tier accessed by that process, the filtering resulting in updating of meta data for less than all the memory pages accessed by the process;
• update the page meta data structure to reflect accesses to memory pages including memory pages that are filtered;
• and
• employ the page meta data to determine which pages are hot pages and which pages are cold pages, wherein hot pages are memory pages with relatively higher access frequencies and cold pages are memory pages with relatively lower access frequencies.