Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/931812/

The memory-management subsystem has the unenviable task of trying to
predict which pages of memory will be needed in the near future. Since
predictions tend to be difficult, the code relies heavily on the heuristic
that memory used in the recent past is likely to be used again in the near
future. However, even knowing which memory has been recently used can be a
challenge. At the 2023 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, Aneesh Kumar and Wei Xu,
both presenting remotely,
discussed some ways to use the increasingly capable hardware counters that
are provided by current and upcoming CPUs.