Top-tier memory management

Modern computing systems can feature multiple types of memory that differ in their performance characteristics. The most common example is NUMA architectures, where memory attached to the local node is faster to access than memory on other nodes. Recently, persistent memory has started appearing in deployed systems as well; this type of memory is byte-addressable like DRAM, but it is available in larger sizes and is slower to access, especially for writes. This new memory type makes memory allocation even more complicated for the kernel, driving the need for a method to better manage multiple types of memory in one system.

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