Adios to Busy-Waiting for Microsecond-scale Memory Disaggregation

How fast and efficiently page faults are handled determines the performance of paging-based memory disaggregation (MD) systems. Recent MD systems employ busy-waiting in page fault handling to avoid costly interrupt handling and context switching. Upon a page fault, they issue a remote fetch request and busy-wait for the completion of the request rather than yield their execution to other tasks. While these attempts succeed to cut the latency of MD systems to microseconds, they suffer from head-of-line (HOL) blocking that leads to high tail latency and causes RDMA network underutilization.