Optimizing power consumption of memory deduplication scheme

Recent mobile consumer devices are suffering from limited memory and power consumption. The deduplication technique will be helpful to reduce memory footprint by identifying the same content memory pages. Linux is adopting the Kernel Samepage Merging (KSM) scheme for memory page deduplication. However, current KSM can invoke significant power consumption due to its inefficient scanning. In consumer devices, if a page is not merged with other pages during the last several scanning rounds, it is less likely to be merged at the following scanning rounds. Considering such a feature, a novel KSM scanning technique is proposed, called N-chance partial scanning. Experimental results show that the proposed technique can reduce the power consumption by up to 67.6%.