Karma: Know-it-all replacement for a multilevel cache

Abstract

Multilevel caching, common in many storage configurations, introduces new challenges to traditional cache management: data must be kept in the appropriate cache and replication avoided across the various cache levels. Some existing solutions focus on avoiding replication across the levels of the hierarchy, working well without information about temporal locality–information missing at all but the highest level of the hierarchy. Others use application hints to influence cache contents. We present Karma, a global non-centralized, dynamic and informed management policy for multiple levels of cache. Karma leverages application hints to make informed allocation and replacement decisions in all cache levels, preserving exclusive caching and adjusting to changes in access patterns. We show the superiority of Karma through comparison to existing solutions including LRU, 2Q, ARC, MultiQ, LRU-SP, and Demote, demonstrating better cache performance than all other solutions and up to 85% better performance than LRU on representative workloads.