Top 10 List of Week 05

1. Abusing Virtual Memory to Exploit a Design Flaw in Intel Chips
   This Project Zero artcile demonstrated a way to read priveledged memory location by abusing Virtual Memory on Windows Machine. The article explains very thoroughly how the exploit works and how it was first discovered, and how it can be abused. A really interesting article about how virtual memory can be used to penetrate a flaw in a computer processor.

2. OS: Tuning Manajemen Memory
   This is an Indonesian article written by the one and only Mr. Onno. Explains how memory management works and how to properly tune it. Mr. Onno explained in the article about things to avoid, this we can utilize to be more efficient in memory usage, and such. I really recommend you to read this if you have no idea what this week is talking about.

3. Virtual Memory Emulator
   A virtual memory emulator written in Java. It simulates this functionality of virtual memory using a few components such as a TLB lookup table, a page table, physical memory for storing loaded frames from disk, and finally an address reader.

4. Exploring virtual memory with vmstat
vmstat, short for Virtual Memory Statistics Reporter, is a tool to helps you explore the contents of your vitual memory. Things like memory, paging, processes, IO, CPU, and disk scheduling are all included in the array of information provided. This article will help you learn more about vmstat.

5. The Cost of Software-Based Memory Management Without Virtual Memory
   The costs of virtual memory have increased significantly. With large memory workloads, virtualized environments, data center computing, and chips with multiple DMA devices, virtual memory can degrade performance and increase power usage. This paper investigates the issue and explored ways to improve software performance.

6. How to use shared memory with Linux in C
   This discussion discussed how to use shared memory with C using shmget amd mmap. People also give code snippets/examples on how hared memory can be implemented using both approach.

7. CLOCK-Pro: An Effective Improvement of the CLOCK Replacement
   CLOCK-Pro aims to reducing the cost of paging between memory and disks. Due to limitations of LRU/CLOCK, a few researcher begin to develop a new Virtual Memory Pagings called LRM and later improvement called CLOCK-Pro. Checkout their publication on the link above!

8. Improving performance on NUMA systems
   As we know NUMA, or Non-Uniform Memory Access, is a way to access memory content faster than traditional UMA. This paper talks about ways to tune and optimize your NUMA-aware operating systems and how it complement Thrashing. From this article I learned that we can tune NUMA behavior in Linux through numactl utility.

9. OSDev WIKI: Virtual Memory Paging
   This wiki page talks about paging structure in operating system development. The article covers a lot of topics regarding Memory Paging, from guide to use MMU to it’s manipulation and faults. The site itself worth a bookmark for future reference.

10. Handling memory fragmentation
    This pamphlet talks about how memory fragmentation issue can be a huge problem if left unsolved. So the pamphlet also talks about ways to fix it and compare common memory-allocation alogrithms (buddy, first-fit, etc) to see which algo suits our needs better.