MANAGING FREE SPACE IN A COMPRESSED MEMORY SYSTEM

Disclosed is a compressed memory management method for a computer system having one or more processors (P1-PN), compressible main memory, secondary memory and an operating system. The compressible main memory has a compressed memory space comprising an active part directly accessible to said one or more processors (P1-PN), as well as an inactive part not directly accessible to said one or more processors (P1-PN) in the form of memory freed up by memory compression. The compressed memory management method comprises maintaining, in an auxiliary memory, a layout of the compressed memory space of the compressible main memory, the layout including size and location of individual memory pages as well as free memory regions in said compressed memory space; triggering the compression of a memory page in the compressible main memory; intercepting a page-in request from said operating system to said secondary memory, using the layout of the compressed memory space maintained by the auxiliary memory to locate, when available, in said auxiliary memory a page requested by the page-in request, and making the located requested page available in the active part of the compressed memory space; and intercepting a page-out request from said operating system to said secondary memory, using the layout of the compressed memory space maintained by the auxiliary memory to obtain a free region for a page requested by the page-out request, and accommodating the requested page in the obtained free region of the auxiliary memory.