Traditional operating systems use virtual memory to provide users with a bigger memory than a physical memory. The virtual memory augments the insufficient physical memory by a swap device. Since disks are usally as the swap device, the cost of a page fault is relatively high compared to the access cost of the physical memory. Recently, numerous papers have investigated the Network RAM in order to exploit the idle memory in the network instead of disks. Since today`s distributed systems are interconnected with high-performance networks, the network latency is far smaller than the disk access latency.
In this paper we design and implement the Network RAM using block device driver on Linux. This is the first implementation of the Network RAM on Linux. We propose the new reliability method to recover a page when the other workstation`s memory is damaged. The system using the Network RAM as the swap device reduces the execution time by 40.3% than the system using the disk as the swap device. The performance results suggest that our proposed new reliability method has the similar execution time with others, but uses smaller server memory and generates less message traffic than others.
