Valinor: Architectural Support for Fast, Energy-Efficient and Programmable Physical Memory Allocation

The problem is that physical memory allocation in current systems incurs high overhead from minor page faults, which can account for up to 54% of runtime and 40% of system energy in short-lived workloads like serverless functions. The method, Valinor, is a hardware-OS cooperative substrate that introduces a programmable hardware allocation engine executing compact OS-supplied allocation libraries at near fixed-hardware speed. On a BOOM RISC-V soft core running Linux, Valinor accelerates allocation by 17x, improves end-to-end performance by 16%, and reduces energy consumption by up to 8%, with full-system simulation confirming hardware-class performance across six allocation libraries. This matters because Valinor provides the flexibility to support diverse allocation policies and adapt to new hardware conditions while achieving the performance and energy efficiency of dedicated hardware.