Application-directed memory de-duplication

In a computing system comprised of an application executing on top of a virtualization control layer, wherein the virtualization control layer maps portions of a virtual memory to portions of a physical memory, a method for managing memory comprising the steps of:

• identifying, by the application, a range of the virtual memory whose probability of being replicated in the virtual memory exceeds a given threshold;
• obtaining, by the application, at least one memory address corresponding to the range of virtual memory;
• passing, from the application to the virtualization control layer, an identifier for the range of virtual memory and the memory address corresponding to the range of virtual memory, wherein the identifier is useable by the virtualization control layer to identify similar ranges within the virtual memory;
• and
• providing an application programming interface configured to allow the identifier and the range of virtual memory to be passed down from the application to a guest operating system, and from the guest operating system to the virtualization control layer at runtime;
• wherein the application executes on the guest operating system, and the guest operating system executes on the virtualization control layer;
• and
• wherein the method further comprises the step of using at the virtualization control layer, based at least in part upon the identifier, delta encoding to reduce redundant information in the physical memory.