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Memory tiering (MTS)

Sinty OS can treat memory as tiers rather than as one flat pool. Hot pages, the ones you are actively using, stay in fast RAM; cold pages that have not been touched in a while are moved to a slower local tier. Your RAM stays free for the work in front of you, and the system stays responsive when memory runs tight instead of stalling or killing an app.

This is provided by the Memory Tiering Standard (MTS), a project developed alongside Sinty OS. It is not swap or a compression trick. It is a policy that decides, page by page, where memory should live, with the kernel guaranteeing that the system always makes forward progress and never loses your data.

Memory tiering is on by default: Sinty OS tiers your memory from the moment it boots, with no setup on your part. It is still maturing along with the rest of the system (see the pre-release note on the overview).

What it does for you

Section titled “What it does for you”
  • Keeps RAM for what matters. Pages you are not using are moved out of RAM to a local cold tier, so the memory you are actively using has room.
  • Stays responsive under pressure. When memory fills up, instead of thrashing or killing an application, the system relieves the pressure by tiering cold pages, so the machine keeps going.
  • Never loses data. The move is safe: a page that was tiered out is brought back correctly the moment it is needed. Tiering is transparent to your apps.

How it is different from swap

Section titled “How it is different from swap”

Traditional swap and compressed-RAM tricks react late and treat all memory the same. MTS instead gives each page an explicit cost and places it against declared tiers with measurable targets, so the system can keep a promise about how responsive it stays, not just push pages out when it is already in trouble. The kernel owns the safety; the policy on top decides placement.

Configuring and watching it

Section titled “Configuring and watching it”

You do not have to turn memory tiering on; it runs from boot. If you want to see what it is doing or tune it, that lives in the developer and administration tools rather than the everyday settings. See MTS for developers and administrators for how it is configured and how to watch it work.